The secret of good comedy is that they make it look easy—Buster Keaton falls gracefully out of a chair, Chris Rock lands a punchline that’s been built up without you noticing, and the painstaking process that made it all happen is hidden. Neighbors 2 is a good comedy because it moves along with that same ease, delivering running gags and gross-out shocks and tender character beats at all the moments we expect from a studio comedy (and the first film; Neighbors 2 closely follows the pattern of its predecessor). But it also overcomes a much trickier Hollywood hurdle than turning in a good comedy: it passes the Bechdel test, over and over again, and makes that look easy too.

The Bechdel test is overly simple, yes, but a usefully blunt tool to compare Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising to its modern comedy brethren, virtually none of which have bothered to imbue female characters with the agency, humor, or actual personality that the women of Neighbors 2 deliver in spades. The movie wears its feminist credentials proudly, the action kicking off when a trio of college girls (Chloe Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons, Beanie Feldstein) rebel against the sexist double standards for sororities and start their own. And it’s not content to stop at letting the girls party as hard as the boys, or to let our grown-up heroes—Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne’s Mac and Kelly Radner—fret at the challenges of raising a girl in this terrible world. Neighbors 2 dives into the myriad double standards that face young women, from the actual law (“Google it”) that prevents sororities from throwing parties to the rape culture of frats, and lays out a roadmap for surviving it that doesn’t have to include a prank war against your neighbors, but is fun to watch anyway.

And then it doesn’t even stop there—Zac Efron’s chiseled frat god Teddy Sanders has also returned, now flailing through adult life and undergoing a genuine crisis when his best friend (Dave Franco) gets engaged to his boyfriend, in a scene that’s been rightfully praised for its cheerful embrace of same-sex marriage among polo shirt-wearing bros. Even as the Radners fret about selling their house, making room for a second child and not screwing up their first, Teddy’s quarter-life crisis may have the film’s strongest emotional pull, as he first tries to reclaim his college glory, eventually sides with the adults, and all the while learns, to his astonishment, that calling women “hoes” isn’t cool anymore. Efron sells Teddy as a wounded, hunky puppy, at one point explicitly depicted as Mac and Kelly’s surrogate child—albeit a child happily objectified as part of a group effort to steal the sorority’s weed supply during a tailgate.

Neighbors 2 has the same empathy for its characters that made the first Neighbors such a surprising treat, a story in which everyone—even a flustered dad played in a perfect cameo by Kelsey Grammar, or a pair of dueling real estate brokers played by Billy Eichner and Liz Cackowski—is struggling just to have their shit together. Moretz’s Shelby is a devious schemer, capable of coming up with pranks like pelting the Radners’ house with used tampons, but also a girl looking for friends and an alternative to frat parties. Kelly (Rose Byrne remains the stealth MVP of this franchise) is a capable, gorgeous mom who also can’t keep her toddler daughter from dressing up her vibrator like a princess. Even Teddy’s friend Garf (Jerrod Carmichael), gainfully employed as a cop, is at a loss experiencing his own “training day” at the hands of his overzealous partner (Hannibal Burress, reprising his role from Neighbors). Neighbors 2 takes place in a terrifying world in which Dave Franco is the most put-together person—which, as it turns out, is not that far from reality.

Did I mention that this movie is also hilarious? From elaborate set pieces (the weed heist, which all happens while a grease-slathered Efron is dancing onstage, hums with the energy of a genuine action scene) to intimate moments between the Radners to tiny sight gags, director Nicholas Stoller keeps the comedy beats coming at a thrilling pace. He elegantly papairsring feminist arguments with the sight of Zac Efron dressed up as Hillary Clinton in a way that makes you wonder why no one ever did it before. As some comedians fight back against college campus P.C. culture and defend their right to alienating humor, Neighbors 2 makes it look so much simpler—and funnier—to just be cool to everyone, man. The sorority sisters of this movie aren’t fighting for the right to party, but to do it on their own terms; Stoller, Rogen, and company have infiltrated the studio system to make a comedy on their own uncompromising terms. Is it too much to hope that more progressive-minded filmmakers follow their lead?