It’s day seven of my first South by Southwest and I’m getting tired. The festival’s been greatly enjoyable, and it’s not even over yet—God willing I’ll see another movie tonight and two tomorrow, capping my total number of films during the fest in the low twenties with only a couple of them not quite landing (I deduced two outright duds from the critical reception to this year’s lineup and avoided them both). But it’s late afternoon/evening as I type this, and my friends are burnt out. Honestly, I get it. The festival’s a lot of rushing around and waiting, concentrated bursts of nerve-wracking anticipation juxtaposed with your brain growing increasingly tired the longer you sit in one place, depending on the time of day and how long you’ve been awake, among other things. But it’s also the first time I’ve ever done something like this, I finally met my friend’s friends from his college (who are all great people), and those two worlds of mine colliding, however briefly, has been special. Figures that all of them saw this before me and raved about it, so I knew I had to catch its final screening…

…and my God were they right: I Used to Be Funny will probably end up being my favorite film of the festival and among my favorites of the entire year. Of course Rachel Sennott is incredible, channeling last-ditch, desperate exhaustion and anxiety into a controlled yet raw lead turn that might be my favorite performance of hers in a recent run full of great ones, but the rest of the cast is no slouch. Petsa, Jones, and Jalees all offer fantastic support, as does Ennis Esmer, whose work here proves that most of the actors I remember from NBC’s Blindspot (a show I could go on about for a while, for some reason) are legitimately good in their own right.

But Pakiw’s script and direction all form the thing perfectly. The film’s tonal balancing is expert—it’s a heavy drama at the core, but being about a comedian lends it a levity it wields well. The jokes never overshadow the stakes and gravitas at hand, and both Pakiw and Sennott are smart enough to know that some of them aren’t funny and only serve to make the drama even more devastating. But sometimes, they’re just great jokes, registering as topical and recent but rarely sticking out as dated or pandering, at least for me (and the few times a reference bordered on pandering to me specifically, one to a college improv game and another to a film, both reveal characters’ dimensions and relationships at certain story points). The direction accentuates all this, with angles that put the viewer into Sam’s headspace, singularly track her movements and goals, and seamlessly cross-cut between the story’s parallel timelines. Even when a key plot point seems like it suddenly comes out of nowhere, the structure recontextualizes it so that the initial mention of it isn’t as truthful as it first appeared, and it’s—along with the other weighty topics explored in the script—handled realistically yet delicately. They go right up to the line on a visual level, but Pakiw is so assured that she still only goes as far as she needs to. It’s “serious indie drama” work, but it’s damn good at what it’s doing and supremely effective. And I haven’t even mentioned the final needle-drop that hits like a ton of bricks and feels totally earned, or the character who reminded me of a friend who’s at the festival with me right now and thus just cut deep. Maybe I was in the right place at the right time, a thought I’ve come back to in my reactions to SXSW films—some of them definitely benefit from being seen with huge crowds on giant screens at world premieres—but I think this one might earn its raves, from others and myself, on its own terms. It’s something special.