First, it must be said: Medicine for Melancholy is the worst title for a film in recent memory, especially since it has no direct relation to the plot or the characters. It's a shame that such an appealing, sincere movie has a name that sounds like a poorly translated French film. But brave viewers who push past the melodrama on the marquee will be rewarded with a thoughtful, adult movie about urban life in the early 21st century.

After a drunken hookup, Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Joanne (Tracey Heggins) spend a lazy Sunday traveling around San Francisco by cab, bike, and foot, getting to know each other. Medicine is almost a black-and-white film—nearly every frame has had the color leached from it, the way the world looks on a hungover morning. It's fitting that the dialogue is almost entirely, in one way or another, about color: Micah is a fledgling Angry Young Black Man, but also a beanie-wearing hipster doofus. Joanne is dating a white guy and thinks of herself as an arty film nerd who happens to be black.

Cenac's laid-back stoner delivery and Heggins's pixie cuteness effectively camouflage the film's intentions. They have a genuine chemistry, and it is to their credit that Medicine works as a high-minded date movie. It's to director Barry Jenkins's credit that his first movie also functions as a kind of documentary of race and gentrification in San Francisco right now. Micah is the kind of privileged young urban black man who can seduce a girl by singing a goofy version of the Mr. Rogers theme song and then drop into a rant about how just 7 percent of his city is black without realizing that his own relationship to race is a complicated thing.

Medicine stumbles only once, when it literally stops everything for a lecture. Near the end of the film, just as the characters are reaching a significant point in their relationship, they stop and gawk into a storefront where a discussion on gentrification takes place, and the next five minutes of the movie consists of real-life housing activists trying not to look into the camera as they discuss how rent control is about to go extinct in San Francisco. A more practiced director/screenwriter than Jenkins would be able to deftly fold the pertinent information into the dialogue, but this interlude makes Medicine feel like a very good first date that gets interrupted by a short, unexciting business call. recommended