'Sitting in Bars with Cake' review: Great movie (with a terrible title)

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Life is all about learning new things, or so they say, so it's wonderful to report that thanks to the movie "Sitting in Bars with Cake," this critic is now familiar with the practice of "cakebarring." 

Cakebarring, you see, is exactly what it sounds like: the practice of baking cakes, bringing them to bars and using them as a conversation starter to meet new and interesting people, especially those who might be boyfriend or girlfriend material.

The Prime Video movie is an adaptation of the 2015 collection of recipes and stories by the author Audrey Shulman, who spent a year doing the cakebarring thing herself in Los Angeles. It stars Yara Shahidi ("Black-ish") and Odessa A'zion (Netflix's "Grand Army") as best friends Jane and Corinne, twenty-somethings who set out to spend a year bringing Jane's fancy cakes to a different City of Angels bar weekly.

But the cakes and the bars are just a way into what turns out to be a story of close friendship that becomes deeply tested when Corinne gets diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Shulman writes the screenplay, Trish Sie ("Pitch Perfect 3") directs and the co-stars include Ron Livingston (as Corinne's dad) and none other than Bette Midler (as her boss).

MY SAY It's awfully hard to be filled with anticipation for any movie called "Sitting in Bars with Cake," considering that it would fundamentally fail a basic litmus test by offering the audience no bars or cake for themselves.

Why bother watching people doing this when you could go do it yourself? 

It sounds like a movie dreamed up as some sort of Food Network program. Or an ad for a cake company. Or a Los Angeles nightlife travel special.

It doesn't sound very compelling, in other words.

And yet "Sitting in Bars with Cake" turns out to be much more substantial and affecting than the concept or title might suggest.

It has perfectly crafted performances and keen insights into what deep and lasting friendship looks like. Shahidi and A'zion create the sort of delicate intimacy and second-nature understanding that can only develop between two people who have completed the picture in each other's lives for so long.

As Corinne's illness take hold and worsens, the movie carefully avoids the expected clichés, including the trap of relying on too much sentimentality.

It's grounded, even subtle in its depiction of how the truth sets in for Corinne and Jane, and for Corinne's parents (Livingston and the great character actor Martha Kelly). The movie works best in the ways it evokes the desperation and the helplessness that come from fighting such a difficult battle with our own bodies, and what it can feel like to face the new reality created by devastating loss.

Joy and sadness mix with anger; a trip to a pottery studio culminates with a cathartic smashing. 

And the cakes at the center of the movie are less about the strangers they attract and more about what they communicate about the deep and abiding love between these best friends.

BOTTOM LINE It's better than it sounds, thanks to terrific performances and a perceptive screenplay.