Review: 'One Night Only' serves up a rancid rom-com premise that not even Monica Barbero's abundant charms can save

It’s strange for a movie with a premise as idiotically off-track as the one in the rom-com “One Night Only” to get made. Usually, someone at the studio or among the producers would strangle a bad idea like this one in the crib, rather than feed it and let it grow into a full-scale terrible movie.

The premise is laid out in the opening seconds — that sex between unmarried adults is illegal in the United States, and everyone has been fitted with a sensor on their wrists that alerts the cops if two consenting adults are making the beast with two backs outside the confines of marriage. There is an exception, for one night a year, 12 hours where anything goes if all parties are OK with it and wear condoms.

Think of it as “The Purge,” the franchise where all crime is legal for one night, but with consensual intercourse. And, like “The Purge,” the premise of “One Night Only” leads to a lot of questions — the biggest being “who the hell would agree to this?” and “why hasn’t the overthrow of the government started yet?” — that the movie doesn’t come close to answering.

There’s a movie-logic reason for such a premise, which is that romantic comedies need a reason to keep their central couple apart for as long as possible. In the old days, social norms, religious admonishments and the Hays Code — Hollywood’s prudish self-policing policies, which invented rules like having even married couple sleep in separate beds onscreen — took care of that. In more liberated times, it’s gotten tougher to keep the walls of Jericho (like in “It Happened One Night”) upright. 

The couple that director Will Gluck (“Easy A,” “Anyone But You”) and screenwriter Travis Braun are trying to keep from making whoopee are Allie (Monica Barbero), a singer who makes a living turning pop songs into pharmaceutical jingles, and Owen (Callum Turner), who owns a pizzeria.

Owen’s plan for the evening is to hook up with his longtime girlfriend, Malika (Maya Hawke), and propose marriage. Allie’s itinerary calls for her and her best pal, Jacinda (played by the singer King Princess) to go looking together for a couple of hot guys at a bar. Both plans are thwarted by the other party — Malika wants to sleep with a hot neighbor, while Jacinda finds a sexy prince (Okieriete Onaodowan) while Allie’s in line for the bathroom.

Allie’s lesbian roommate (Quintessa Swindell) tells Allie to go out there and find someone, and gives her a dress with fewer square inches of fabric than a hand towel to attract a likely partner for the night. Owen can’t go back to the apartment he shares with Malika, or hang out with his mom, Linda (Molly Ringwald), because she’s got plans with her boyfriend, Bob (LeVar Burton). 

Out on the streets, Allie and Owen keep running into each other — and they ignore the signs from the universe, and bad screenwriting, that they should be together.

There are some funny moments here and there. My favorite is when Allie tries to navigate a bar full of desperate guys (including “Succession’s” Cousin Greg, Nicholas Braun, and “SNL’s” Ben Marshall) looking for a woman who will indulge their kinks. Or there’s an extended joke where Owen goes from bodega to bodega to find one that still has condoms in stock.

But the repressive and stupid unfairness of the mandate that sets up the 12-hour scenario, and the forced way Gluck includes clocks in every scene to remind inattentive viewers of the countdown, can’t be overcome. That’s especially sad for Barbero, who’s an incredibly charismatic performer — as she proved playing Joan Baez in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” and getting an Oscar nomination for it — who deserves a star vehicle that’s not as aggravating as “One Night Only.”

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‘One Night Only’

★1/2

Opens Friday, August 7, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual material, language and brief nudity. Running time: 102 minutes.