TAKE TWO, BIRDIE MAXWELL

After dressing down a director and being canceled by the public, America’s (now former) rom-com sweetheart goes on a road trip to discover which of her exes wrote her an anonymous love letter.

Thirty-four-year-old Birdie Robinson, from Medford, Oregon, is movie royalty. Except she’s really Birdie Maxwell from Barton, California, and she's been caught in an epic downward spiral after having a tantrum on the set of her latest movie. The fact that she was really calling out the director for being handsy with extras and day actors is swept under the rug. Her attempt at an apology video is a failure, and the public has turned very much against her, so she finds herself retreating to her childhood home in the middle of California, an origin story she’s kept entirely secret during the rise of her acting career. While she's going through boxes of old papers, she finds an anonymous love letter she'd never seen before—no date, no signature—and decides, for better or worse, that what she needs to rehabilitate her image is a rom-com of her own making in which she tracks down all her exes to ask if they wrote the letter. Along for the ride is Elliot O'Brien, her best friend Mona’s twin brother. She’s known Mona, now a dive bar owner, and Elliot, now a renowned reporter, since the twins moved to town when they were all 12. The story follows the arc of Birdie's quest in a rickety RV to find the handful of exes who could have written the letter and Elliott’s reporting of the effort. Alternating between Birdie's and Elliot's viewpoints, the straightforward story is bolstered by the significant amount of space each main character spends thinking about the crush they've had on the other since they were kids and regretting the awkward end to a one-night stand they had seven years earlier.

A drawn-out story of two complicated people scared to tell each other their true feelings, even after more than 20 years.