We all know weddings have little do with men. Sure, marriage does. But the marriage ceremony in its contemporary form is a female-centric ritual, often more about realizing girlish fairy tale fantasies, making a social statement, or, in the case of the new Judd Apatow-produced comedy, Bridesmaids, working out deep-rooted anxieties about friendship status and life’s ultimate meaning. So it is fitting that the groom in Bridesmaids has scarcely a line, which allows the film’s focus to land squarely where it matters, on the ensemble cast of witty – if neurotic –minor misfits who unravel in the build up to the big day.

Bridesmaids writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo capture marriage preparation’s bloated absurdities with clever, well-sharpened wit. The crux of the conflict involves childhood friends Annie (Kristen Wiig) and Lillian (Maya Rudolph). When Lillian is engaged, Annie is thrown into an emotional crisis, in part due to the impending loss of her best friend and confident, but also because the milestone of marriage provokes the occasion of life reflection and reevaluation. What am I doing with my life, where is it going, and why can’t I find love, Annie asks herself. What emerges from the inquiry is a self-depreciating vision of modern woman in crisis: sexually free (Annie enjoyes a sexually satisfying, but emotionally demoralizing relationship with her self-absorbed, well-to-do “f**k buddy) and professionally lost (her dream business, a bakery, went out of business).

Playing out in counterpoint to the pathetic – and sympathetic – Annie is Helen (Rose Byrne), Lillian’s newest close friend, the wife of her wealthy husband’s wealthier boss. Helen still operates according to the social mores of cliquish high school. She is rich, popular, pretty in a childhood beauty pageant sort of way, and sweet and kind to the point of saccharine annoyance. She also proves, along with Annie, desperately competitive about her friendship with Lillian. We get a sense of where this is going after Lillian asks Annie to be her maid of honor, and at the engagement part, both Annie and Helen make competing speeches, each trying to one-up the dearness of their relationship with the bride-to-be.

Bridesmaid’s essential plot is a playing out of this conflict through a series of madcap sceneries, with that particular Apatow taste for over-the-line body humor. There is the food poisoning lunch that provokes vomit and diarrhea during the bridesmaids dress fitting; Annie’s drunken antics on a flight to Las Vegas, which results in her arrest and a thorough undoing of the bachelorette party, and Annie’s breakdown at the bridal shower, which has her smashing Helen’s over-the-top decorative scheme in a brutally embarrassing meltdown.

These moments provide occasions of epic comic pathos, but much of the humor in Bridesmaids is provided through its mad cap cast of side-stage females. Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey) is a frazzled housewife, desperately horny and self-destructive. Becca (Ellie Kemper) is a sexually crimped mother, naïve, cheery, and lonely. Megan (Melissa McCarthy) gets the most laughs as a masculine powerhouse of a girl, severe, odd, aggressive, and ultimately sweet-hearted (even if they did have to adorn her character with an unnecessary, and somewhat derogatory sexual fetish).

There is one male character at play in all of this, Officer Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd) a cop who pulls Annie over one night, the two discovering a mutual attraction. With the arrival of Rhodes, you think this should all just work out in a happy-ever-after romance, but Bridesmaid’s is to clever a movie to make things that easy. Annie resists potential contentment, pledging her fidelity to the values of supposed freedom that are her ultimate emotional undoing.

It is all very funny in often crude, sad sort of way, a movie about simple heroics: the courage to not write yourself off, the courage to get out of bed in the morning; the courage to allow yourself to be loved. And while the last third of the film runs short on jokes and drags sluggishly through its romantic necessities, Bridesmaid’s comic buffoonery is put to good (if occasionally nauseating) use, its sardonic, real woman-championing wit proving on-point and cathartic.