The overwhelmingly named Kenya McQueen (Sanaa Lathan) is a perfectionist. Each morning, she speedwalks through the park near her L.A. home, gearing up for yet another busy day at the accounting firm where she's about to make partner. She tends to make lists, as in, what she doesn't "do" (sushi, dogs, the color red) and the attributes of her IBM (Ideal Black Man): taller than she is, educated, professional. She knows what she wants.

And yet, she's not even close to having it. As she and her similarly equipped and ambitious girlfriends—Cheryl (Wendy Raquel Robinson), Suzzette (Golden Brooks) and Neda (Taraji P. Henson)—commiserate over drinks, they cite the infamous statistic that serves as Something New's point of departure: 42.4 percent of black women will never marry, owing to a dearth of acceptable partners. When her friends advise Kenya to loosen up ("Let go, let flow"), she reluctantly agrees to a blind date—another thing she doesn't "do."

Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Sanaa Lathan as Something New's adventurous single.

She regrets it immediately, and that goes double when she sees her date is white. Making her way to their table at a Magic Johnson Starbucks, she marks herself as black ("How you doin', brother?" she asks an employee), a performance broad enough that her date, landscape architect Brian (Simon Baker), observes, "You're making sure everyone knows you're down." Unable to relax and unable even to admit an attraction to Brian, she cuts off the date but soon hires him to design her backyard garden.

Their differences are immediate and instructive, and sometimes not entirely happily. She has trouble with his hairy and enthusiastically affectionate golden retriever; he wonders about her resolutely beige decor. She freaks out over a spider; he informs her that she "needs" him (to complete her garden, of course). She wears a suit on Saturday; he thinks she needs to relax. As the film is focused on Kenya's dilemmas, Brian is something of a cipher, though the primary force for her transformation: "I take hard earth and make things bloom," he explains.

While this sort of arrangement is typical for the genre, the race and culture dynamics are unusual. Brian knows she's "sensitive about color," but also calls Kenya on her fear of spiders (adorably, by giving her a copy of Charlotte's Web), her general nervousness and her weave ("I'm just wondering what you looked like completely naked"). The only reason his interventions are OK is because he sees the "real" Kenya, who wants to relax. But her background—an asthmatic and sheltered childhood, cotillions and class anxiety, high expectations from her uptight academic mother (Alfre Woodard), her own misreading of her big-hearted doctor dad (Earl Billings)—makes her worry about "having a good time" or worse, "being herself."

But if her conflict is interesting, the film tends to reduce it to one-liner comments by antic supporting characters. Her wannabe-player brother Nelson (Donald Faison) wonders if she's "sleeping with the enemy"; her girlfriends insist that the thing with Brian is just about sex, that her "serious" relationship will be with an IBM. And then, on cue, Nelson introduces her to his former law school professor, Mark (Blair Underwood), with whom she has "more in common." They share stories of "that old black tax," and understand without having to explain what it means to have to "work twice as hard just to prove yourself equal."

Brian can't compete. But because he's been so great all along, so charming and so into "natural" pleasures (the flowers and plants, among other things), he has to have a meltdown moment so that Kenya can have her crisis. Their argument erupts during one of Kenya's complaints about the "white boys on the plantation" in her office (whom we have seen act out, so we know she's right to be upset). "Can we give the 'white boys' a rest?" asks Brian. Suddenly it's clear that he doesn't get it, that she's making compromises, that she needs to be able to talk about "the white shit that drives [her] crazy" and that he needs to appreciate what "being black is about—you never get a night off."

Though Brian is quite undone by her rage at this moment, he's a good listener (which is why she likes him in the first place, right?). You know this because he's already endured a comedy club routine by Sommore (in which she notes that the problem with white men is they don't know how to break up with a woman, and tend to leave her "chopped up in the freezer"), as well as interrogations by Nelson and Cheryl's working-class boyfriend Walter (Mike Epps). Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Something New is that it's Walter, at first resistant to the white boy, who speaks the film's moral: "It's not about color, it's about love between a man and a woman." That is new: Epps as a character with an arc.

Something New Directed by Sanaa Hamri A Focus Features release Opens Friday at area theaters