His, Hers, and Ours (The Ninth House, GroupM Motion Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Just Wright Lifetime showed one of their own movies, also a rom-com with (mostly) Black actors, which they’d been promoting quite extensively of late: His, Hers, and Ours. This one, directed by Patricia Cuffie-Jones from a script by Bart Baker, interlocks two plot lines. In the first, successful Black restaurateur Kelly Pellman (Lesley-Ann Brandt) has a best-seller that appears to be part cookbook and part memoir. She’s growing her business, a small chain called Soul Pasta (in the opening scene we see her making her own pasta) and is anxious about whether she can keep her business going on the larger scale. She’s also worried about the scapegrace antics of her teenage son Isaiah (Tyler Lofton), whom she’s steering towards a college application to Howard (the most prestigious of the historically Black colleges and universities and the alma mater of Thurgood Marshall and Kamala Harris). Kelly has raised Isaiah as a single parent since his father Arthur (Curtis Hamilton) abandoned her about a decade earlier and forced Kelly and Isaiah to stay in roach-infested room-shares until she gradually made enough money to be able to afford their own apartment. The second story deals with Black entrepreneur Darius Stone (Taye Diggs), who built a fortune on an app showing working women how to organize their time. Alas, his investors have just forced him to sell the company to a larger white-owned firm, and though they offered him the chance to stay on in a figurehead position, he turned them down. We learn later that the idea for the app was actually that of Darius’s wife, only she got leukemia and died just before it became a major success. Darius catches his daughter Kai (Chloe Flowers) in bed with a young man, screams at her, and tells her her mom would be ashamed of her if she were still alive. The link between the two stories turns out to be that the young man Darius caught his daughter in bed with was Isaiah Pellman, and though they hadn’t reached the stage of actual penetration, they’d got as far as him dry-humping her in the guise of “studying.” Much to Darius’s disgust, his mother has arranged to get Kai birth-control pills, on the ground that she’s probably going to have sex anyway and it’s better if she’s protected.

Isaiah and Kai end up in trouble with school, and the officious assistant principal says he won’t suspend them, but only if they show up the next Saturday and clean up the school cafeteria – and they’re required to bring their parents. Ultimately the parents show up, but Darius and Kelly are so attracted to each other they blow off the school cleanup session and go on a lunch date instead. This poses a problem for them because Isaiah and Kai both strongly disapprove of their parents getting romantically involved with each other – especially after a classmate goes all paparazzo on them and shoots secret photos of Darius and Kelly making out in a public park. She posts the photos on social media and they go viral at the school Isaiah and Kai attend, and the merciless students taunt them both for having an affair when they’re brother and sister. (They’re not, at least biologically, but they would have the same parental figures if their single parents got together and got married.) Bart Baker throws in an ironic scene in which Darius and Kelly are having sex with each other at Kelly’s home when suddenly her son Isaiah comes in, and Darius literally has to hide from him – a nice, ironic contrast to the earlier scene in which Darius had come home unexpectedly and found Isaiah and Kai making out in her room in his house. I also liked the soft-core porn scene between Darius and Kelly, which was a lot more graphic and exciting than the similar one in Just Wright – especially since, though both Taye Diggs and Lesley-Ann Brandt are Black, she’s so much lighter-skinned than he is I got some of the same thrill of the color contrast I get from interracial porn. (I’ve told my husband Charles that an interracial porn scene in which the Black participant was Barack Obama’s color would do little for me.) We also got some delectable close-ups of Taye Diggs’s bare chest, with his nipples very much in evidence.

Bart Baker throws us a curveball when Kelly, on the advice of her assistant Sofia (Aimee Garcia), throws a “Grand Opening” party for her restaurant (even though it’s been operating for three months now), and Kai overindulges on the sauces and bolts for the bathroom. Kelly immediately assumes that she’s got pregnant by Isaiah, though the pregnancy test she gives Kai turns out to be negative (all of us, including the audience, heave a sigh of relief over that!). There’s also a weird turn in the plot in which Isaiah becomes estranged from his mom and goes off to live with his dad Arthur, who’s reconnected with him after seven years, only the place is a mess, the meal is mashed-potato mix in a frying pan (a sharp contrast to his gourmand mother!), and it turns out the only reason Arthur wanted to take in his son is so he could bill his mom $3,000 per month in child support. And there’s another subplot in which it turns out that Darius has secretly been brewing his own whiskey in the basement of a bar owned by a friend of his, and when the friend decides to sell out, Darius secretly buys the place so he can preserve it as it is instead of having it taken over by a white buyer who’d turn it into another high-end pub. Ultimately all the plot lines resolve: Darius presents Kelly a bottle of his homemade whiskey, Kelly uses it to make a sauce that becomes so sensationally popular a white guy who represents a grocery chain offers to sell it, and both Darius and Kelly realize that it’s going to take the combination of his business expertise and her culinary skills to make the sauce a success and produce enough of it to satisfy the chain’s orders. Frankly, I was hoping the film would end with a double wedding – Darius marrying Kelly and Isaiah marrying Kai – though even in what was already a pretty nervy movie Patricia Cuffie-Jones and Bart Baker weren’t about to go that far! His, Hers, and Ours was a nice enough movie that delivered the rom-com goods, though it wasn’t anywhere near as good as Just Wright.