“Joy Ride” is a rollicking, raunchy R-rated comedy about four friends who get into some outrageous situations during a trip to China, prompting some to call it the Asian American “Hangover.”

What is likely to strike a chord with audiences, however, isn’t so much its gross-out laughs — and there are many as the four traipse through Asia looking for the birth mother of prim and proper lawyer Audrey, played by Ashley Park — but the genuine heart that runs through Adele Lim’s directorial debut. Some of that can be attributed to Lim’s deft touch, as well as a sharp script by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao.

Yet the film’s bonhomie also owes much to its four stars: Park, Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola and Sabrina Wu. Not only do they genuinely like each other, but their paths have crossed in sometimes unexpected ways over the years.

Filming the movie in Vancouver, British Columbia, was like “the summer camp we never got to go to,” said Hsu, the Oscar-nominated actress of“Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

The band got back together in the spring, when “Joy Ride” made its world premiere at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, and the four have been appearing together on a promotional tour leading up to the film’s July 7 theatrical release. They even sat in with the audience in a packed Castro Theatre in May when“Joy Ride” opened CAAMFest, the world’s largest showcase for Asian and Asian American cinema, hosted annually in San Francisco.

“Our chemistry speaks for itself,” Cola, a stand-up comic and actress, told The Chronicle just hours before the film’s Bay Area debut. “I have videos of us laughing and laughing and laughing. We went out to party and stuff, and went out to eatallthe time.”

The roots of that chemistry started in the mid-2010s in Ann Arbor, Mich., where both Park(“Emily in Paris”)and Wu, a comedian who also served as a staff writer for the Disney+ series“Doogie Kameāloha, M.D.”,grew up. While Wu was a high-scoring high school girls basketball player, they heard stories about Park, who by then had graduated from the University of Michigan and moved to New York.

“Ashley was a legend in Ann Arbor,” Wu recalled. “Everybody knows Ashley Park because she was amazing in musical theater there.”

Later, when Wu pursued their dream to become a stand-up comic, they sought out Cola.

“I know every gay in comedy in the world — every single one,” said Wu, who identifies as nonbinary. “So Sherry was someone I looked up to for years and years.”

Meanwhile in New York, Hsu and Park came to know each other because they were often in the same readings and auditions for Broadway productions.

Then, in 2019, Hsu decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue more film and television opportunities. She immediately met Cola.

“The first week I was there, Sherry saw me at an event and said, ‘Hey, were you just on that episode of‘(Awkwafina Is) Nora from Queens’? Gosh, you’re dope!’ ” Hsu recalled. “Sherry immediately invited me to this Asian women dim sum.”

“Stephanie always says I was her first friend in L.A.,” Cola said with a laugh. “That’s my most proud title.”

In 2021, Park and Cola got to know each other online after each posted videos that went viral after the Atlanta spa shootings, in which eight people were killed, most of them women of Asian descent. It was among the incidents that helped spur the Stop Asian Hate movement.

“It was so devastating for the community,” Cola said. “Both of us just supported each other because we saw each other’s videos and left comments and followed each other.”

Lim, known for co-writing the scripts for“Crazy Rich Asians”and“Raya and the Last Dragon,”likely didn’t know all the connections between the four while casting them in “Joy Ride.” But the director certainly took advantage of that chemistry.

“They would show up in my apartment in Vancouver with big fat binders and Post-it Notes, and I would throw up all these cards on a wall tracking everybody’s emotional arc from beginning to end,” Lim told The Chronicle in a separate video interview. “We have these amazing, hilarious, laugh-out-loud jokes, but they all come from a place of character.

“The cast wasn’t just game and all for it — they demanded it and required it, which was fantastic for me.”

事实是,如此强烈的友谊交流tors are a firewall against the harshness of an often tough business, the four said. It’s difficult for anyone to make it in show business, but Asian actors face extra challenges in landing roles.

In 1993,“The Joy Luck Club,”the San Francisco-set adaptation of Bay Area author Amy Tan’s bestseller directed by San Francisco filmmaker Wayne Wang,made historyas a successful Hollywood film with a nearly all-Asian cast. But an anticipated breakthrough of Asian American film projects afterward never materialized.

The 2018 success of“Crazy Rich Asians”helped jump-start a fresh wave of Asian American projects on both television and film, and withthe box-office and Oscar successof “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the movement is still riding high.

Now Hollywood is watching to see if an Asian American raunchfest (the working title of “Joy Ride” was “The Joy F— Club”) can keep it going.

Hsu marveled at how her life has changed since “Everything Everywhere All at Once” opened the 2022 South by Southwest festival, then days laterscreened to a sold-out crowdat the Castro Theatre. A year later “Joy Ride” closed the same festival, and that same week “Everything Everywhere” cleaned up at the Academy Awards. In between, she found time to co-star in the Disney+ series“American Born Chinese.”

“I think it’s so amazing, all the breakthroughs we’ve been having in the Asian community, and I want to get to a place where we exist, where it’s not just a novelty,” Hsu said. “Every movie that we’ve made and every success we have is getting us closer and closer to feeling normal. Not just Asian, not just queer, not just X/Y/Z box, but people — flawed, funny, moving through the world, making messes along the way.

“I feel really proud to get to be a very small part in just making more space that I quite honestly didn't know would ever exist for me growing up. … I'm healing in real time, right? Like all the ‘nevers’ that I was taught to believe as a kid or that I internalized, those are all just dissipating as we continue to move forward as a community.”

Park said the reaction at the screenings she has attended have given her hope that the film will be embraced — and not just by the Asian American community.

“What’s great is watching people from all walks of life, all ages, all demographics, all backgrounds, laughing and crying in the same moments,” Park said. “We want this to be a universal movie. In terms of identity, I might not have the same exact background or attributes or life that Audrey has; I'm certainly not a lawyer. I was not adopted. But right away I knew who she was, which is someone who didn’t grow up surrounded by people who looked like her and felt like she may perhaps overcompensate or prove herself in a way.”

Or, as Cola put it: “It's a human story. It’s a funny-ass movie and we just happen to be Asian.”

Correction:An earlier version of this story misstated the pronoun of actor Sabrina Wu. Wu, who identifies as nonbinary, uses the pronouns they/them.

Freelancer Brandon Yu contributed to this report.

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@BRFilmsAllen