You can’t spell romance without c-o-m-a; oddly enough, this state of deep unconsciousness has previously been mined for screen love stories as disparate as the quirky farce “While You Were Sleeping” and Pedro Almodóvar’s haunting masterpiece “Talk to Her.” In “The Big Sick,” screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon retell their own real-life love story, as his adoration for her grew even as she was medically unresponsive.
It’s a tale that involves comedy-club dreams, immigrant parents clashing with their American-raised children, and a relationship where one partner experiences personal growth while the other is intubated. Those are a lot of plates for any movie to keep spinning, and while “The Big Sick” isn’t always a complete success — it’s another film bearing the name of Judd Apatow (he produced with Barry Mendel) that could stand to lose 15 or 20 minutes — it’s the kind of sweetly funny love story that’s so bizarre that it has to be real.