“Hooking Up” takes chances. It’s a romantic comedy that dares to be harsh, even unpleasant. It’s grounded in things that are inherently unfunny — she’s a sex addict, he has testicular cancer — and yet it actuallyisfunny, without making light of the heavy subject matter.

可以肯定的是,一些将被推迟think of “Hooking Up” as just weird. But sometimes weird is good. Sometimes discordant can be welcome, especially in a formulaic genre like romantic comedy, which can use some shaking up, and especially when you have actors as appealing asBrittany Snowand Sam Richardson to sell it.

Snow is listed as one of the producers, and you can see why she wanted to make this movie. She gets to be funny, but she also gets to be raw. She plays Darla, a sex columnist for a magazine, whose column is getting too bizarre to be relatable. (One story is about where to go for brunch after having an abortion.)

Darla retains lots of force and appeal, but something within her is becoming increasingly skewed. When we first meet her, she’s having clandestine sex with a guy in a classroom, and he turns out to be the leader of her sex addict support group. The group meets right next door to the cancer support group, which Bailey (Richardson) attends.

The premise of “Hooking Up” is so coarse, so low-down, that anyone reading this is bound to think that this movie could only be horrible. Take this in: Bailey has had a recurrence of his testicular cancer and is about to lose his other testicle. Meanwhile, Darla has an idea that, before he has the surgery, the two of them — they’ve just met — should go on a cross-country trip, where they re-enact her most flagrant sexual exploits. For her, it’s a chance at an interesting ongoing blog story, and for him, it’s a sort of last hurrah.

That sounds absolutely ghastly, doesn’t it? On top of that, it’s far-fetched. As an excuse to throw them together on a road trip, it barely makes sense. Yet, in the end, it doesn’t much matter how the movie contrives to get them together. The important thing is that once they’re brought together, there’s a connection that we can believe.

In its own unconventional, nasty way, “Hooking Up” does what every good romantic comedy does: It brings together two imperfect, incomplete people and shows them learning from each other. It makes us believe that two completely opposite personalities can let down their guard for long enough to see, within each other, the things they need.

Richardson, playing someone not unlike the straitlaced character he played in“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,”has fine, idiosyncratic comic timing, native integrity and a nice quality of quiet exasperation. “Hooking Up” shows he can headline a movie.

但雪是启示。她很有趣,但我s also up for the demands of drama. Without hammering it too hard, without becoming sentimental, Snow shows us that this is a damaged person — not entirely and not irrevocably, but damaged all the same. Snow lets go of whatever vanity she has and allows herself to be photographed looking tired and emotionally worked over.

“Hooking Up” is a pretty good movie. I enjoyed it and could even imagine watching it again. But it’s also the movie that shows that Snow doesn’t have to be relegated to pretty good movies. She’s ready for better.

M“Hooking Up”:Romantic comedy. Starring Brittany Snow and Sam Richardson. Directed by Nico Raineau. (R. 104 minutes.) $6.99 onAmazon PrimeandYouTube.