In Plan B the drunken teen party is only the beginning of the .

Directed by actress Natalie Morales (The Little Things) and starring Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles, Plan B is part teen girl buddy comedy and part coming of age drama. Sunny (Verma) and Lupe (Moroles) are best friends, but very different in terms of maturity and experience. Lupe is the more worldly of the two; a sexually active, rebellious pastor’s daughter and tough-talking kleptomaniac. Sunny is a timid virgin, bullied at school and cowed by her overly religious mother.

But it’s Sunny who needs Plan B; prompted to change her goody-two-shoes image, she throws a party at her house in her mom’s absence and has an awkward sexual encounter with a boy from school. Though they use a condom, they don’t use it properly, to put it mildly, and Sunny realizes her only option is to procure the titular Plan B to keep from getting pregnant (and possibly murdered by her mother.)

Unfortunately, Sunny lives in South Dakota, and that’s easier said than done. Sunny first tries the local pharmacy, but the pharmacist (Jay Chandresekhar) refuses to provide the treatment, citing a morality clause that keeps him from having to dispense birth control to unmarried girls. When a desperate Sunny and Lupe protest, he smugly announces his decision allows him to sleep at nights.

With no other option, the girls decide to go to the nearest Planned Parenthood – which is hours away in Rapid City. From there, the movie falls into the familiar rhythms of the wacky road trip movie, full of wrong turns, encounters with wacky strangers, stolen cars, sex, drugs and rock & roll.

Sunny and Lupe’s friendship is tested along the way, and though the circumstances the girls encounter are outrageous, the emotions the two are feeling feel very genuine.

On the surface, Plan B feels a lot like Booksmart, another movie that features two BFFs having one crazy weekend, but this one is much, much more frankly sexual. There’s an extended ‘full-frontal’ scene involving a pierced penis played for laughs, a heart-warming lesbian encounter, and, as the stakes are much higher in this movie, a very real look at the consequences of depriving teens of honest sexual education and access to contraceptives.

The school’s sex ed program is a film comparing women (and just women!) who have sex to broken-down cars. When Lupe and Sunny get to the state’s only Planned Parenthood, they find it is permanently closed. Sunny’s sex partner, an uber-religious boy who also lost his virginity in the encounter, decides he is forgiven for his ‘sin’, callously disregarding the fact that for Sunny, the consequences could be real and very permanent.

Moroles and Verma are endearing and believable as friends and as teens who don’t have all the answers (and who aren’t very good at reading their parents, either.) The story has a satisfying (but not treacly) ending that feels completely earned. Morales proves she has a deft touch with the direction, balancing the highs and lows of being a teenage girl in a world that treats them as either sex objects or inconsequential and silly. The movie has a fun, multi-genre and multi-generation soundtrack that isn’t obtrusive or glaring; the songs hit you just right.

Plan B is not just for teen girls, either; this is a comedy for everyone; girls, boys, parents and especially for smug pharmacists with utterly misguided morality.