One of the most unforgivable (and unforgettable) sins you can commit in youth, say around the sixth grade, happens when you’re desperate to join a new friend group. You want to be cool. You want to be part of their circle. So when someone cracks a joke, you laugh with everyone, then add your own hilarious rejoinder — and everyone just stares. Some invisible line has been crossed. You took the joke too far, and now it’s dead and, with it, your social life, your reputation and your chances of ever being happy again.
This feeling goes a long way toward explaining why “Friendship,” the new cringe-com starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, is often funny and always distressing. The feature debut of the writer and director Andrew DeYoung definitely shares DNA with “I Think You Should Leave,” Robinson’s hit Netflix comedy series, in which he usually plays a guy who can’t quite make out the social cues everyone else seems to follow without trying. So he’s always doing something bizarre, and it’s funny because it’s uncomfortable.
This makes Robinson the perfect, and possibly only, lead for DeYoung’s script. It’s about a man named Craig Waterman who has attained the markers of adulthood — a lovely wife (Tami, played by Kate Mara), a teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer) who still at least talks to him, gainful employment, a nice-enough house — but is functionally still the sixth grader in that friend circle.
Except Craig, being a certain variety of grown American man, doesn’t have friends, per se. He has Tami, who is almost unbelievably nice to him given he’s sort of a putz: obsessed with avoiding Marvel spoilers, loyal to only one brand of clothing that he apparently sources from a restaurant called Ocean View Dining. His co-workers joke around with one another on their smoke breaks, which he watches from his office window, nose all but pressed against the glass. Then, one day, he meets the new neighbor, Austin Carmichael (Rudd), who turns out to be the coolest guy Craig could imagine. Austin has a mustache. He’s the local weatherman. He plays in a band. He buys antique weaponry. He knows just which rules to break to have a good time.
So Craig develops a kind of obsession with Austin, not exactly the creepy kind but not exactly uncreepy, either. Hanging out with Austin, Craig can see a different future for himself, one in which he is a rad, manly, sought-after leader who jams out on the drums and impresses everyone around him. If Craig hangs out with Austin, people will want to be his friend, too.
At first, it works. But you already know Craig is going to mess this up, in his own special equivalent of that sixth-grade nightmare, and “Friendship” ventures into increasingly surreal territory from there.
Cringe comedy requires a dose of plausibility, the unsettling sense that no matter how weird things get, it’s got the watcher’s basic number. Here that’s accomplished through sheer ordinariness. Craig is a profoundly predictable man, a guy with few ambitions or original thoughts. (On a drug trip, sold to him as profoundly revelatory of the meaning of life, he sees himself ordering a Subway sandwich.) He’s not bad at his job, and he hasn’t screwed up his life. He’s just, well, I don’t know, annoying.
In other words, we definitely know this guy. We’ve probably been trying hard, since middle school at least, not to be him. But Robinson’s performance, which sometimes feels dropped in from a parallel dimension that’s about 3 percent different from our own, injects Craig with a quality most similar to an erratically ticking time bomb. Not having developed an interior life, he’s all vibe and reaction: Shame or provocation might make him shrivel, or explode, or some unimaginable third thing.
That results, at times, in a movie that feels like it’s spinning its wheels, going nowhere for long stretches, with Craig just getting more and more exasperated. Yet that same energy keeps the movie watchable even in its lagging stretches, especially since Rudd is there to provide a foil with a handsome confidence that occasionally takes a weird turn. Anything could happen precisely because there’s barely anything happening. These are ordinary guys, living in middling split-level ranch houses in a suburban subdivision with not much else going on. They could be anybody. They might be us. (In fact, when we glimpse pieces of mail a few times, there’s a street and a town and a country but no state — it’s just a made-up place that could be anywhere.)
Technically the film is about male friendship, about the many elements of modern life that conspire to keep men lonely, from fear of not performing masculinity correctly to a lack of places for the average guy in the suburbs to make a buddy. Yet it felt to me more like a feature-length version of that ubiquitous, half-joking rhetorical question: Are men OK?
Some men are fine, the film suggests, but they’re minor characters. It’s the messed-up ones who force everyone to keep looking at them, listening to them, reacting to them. Guys like Craig clearly just never got the memo. Guys like Austin figured out how to ditch their most embarrassing impulses at some point along the way, but are terrified their cover will get blown. When those particular elements combine in a friendship, the results are lethal. These men are so lonely. Thankfully, in a movie, they’re also really funny.
Friendship
Rated R, mostly for the cringing but also for the kind of stuff desperate guys talk about, and a drug trip involving a toad. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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