Stranger things: "Friendship"

These are heady days for fans of the "men are such idiots" subgenre. Possibly the success of 2022's The Banshees of Inisherin opened some chequebooks up, but it's also not as if there's been any shortage of inspiration and material doing the rounds. Last year gave us the choice Malayalam comedy Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil, and now we have Friendship, an American indie that serves as the first big-screen vehicle for Tim Robinson, the creative prime mover and principal agent of chaos behind Netflix's I Think You Should Leave. Anyone who feared Robinson might have to dial down his trademark manic energy to crossover can rest easy; the film, written and directed by fellow TV alumnus Andrew DeYoung, is funny-strange from the off, before multiple plot turns render it stranger still. Robinson's Craig is a married corporate drone, living in a nondescript suburbia with his wife Tami (Kate Mara) and son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer), who presents to us as something of a big kid. When he's not burbling on enthusiastically about Marvel movies, he parrots office speak uncritically (his job involves getting people addicted to phone apps); he suffers from sudden nosebleeds framed as a kind of premature ejaculation brought on by too much excitement; his beigecore wardrobe is restaurant merch. He believes he's made a cool new friend in next-door neighbour Austin (Paul Rudd), but even Austin exerts a very odd idea of cool: a local TV weatherman accessorised with a Seventies moustache and a Stone Age hand axe, he claims not to own a phone (but does) and to know stuff about the mushrooms these boys encounter in the woods. Austin is cosplaying self-sufficiency, and the movie presents normal American life as mostly a matter of putting on a front: ordering the Seal Team Six meal deal at Craig's fave eaterie, taking out the Hero mobile phone plan. You could drive yourself mad trying to keep up such ruggedly masculine appearances, a point proven when Craig subsequently does exactly that.

In making that point, Friendship takes a step or two beyond those Judd Apatow-produced or inspired comedies with which the American cinema saw in this century. While maintaining a comparably high laugh rate, DeYoung has no intention of being as charming or reassuring as his predecessors, who may have felt there was nothing especially wrong with grown men acting like crotch-grabbing, chest-beating college juniors; where the characters in 2009's Rudd-starring I Love You, Man were - bless 'em - trying to make things right, Craig only ever succeeds in making things substantially worse. Robinson is very good at describing a particular (and not exclusively American) type: the agitated beta male who's settled down as society insists and now resents, on some viscerally felt subconscious level, the grown-up stuff everybody's forcing him to do; the type of malcontent prone to haphazardly (and here, straight-up disastrously) pursuing any opportunity he glimpses to recapture his doubtless misremembered glory days. This isn't an easy role to play: unsympathetic to the point of pitiful, obliging the performer to leave any vanity behind in the locker room so as to sink helplessly into a bog. Here is an actor making himself look bad even before Craig swallows a mouthful of poisonous mushroom and is then obliged to empty his guts into a Big Gulp receptacle. (At the very least, it's a useful counterpoint to all Brad Pitt's star-polishing in F1.) Robinson is hardly helped by DeYoung and Sophie Corra's editing strategy, which strives to cut Craig down at every turn, and insists on following his grandest claims ("we'll tear it up on Friday night!") with, say, the sight of five men shivering in a garage, making awkward stabs at conversation. (Matters don't improve any after Craig treats the boys to an impromptu drum solo.)

Rather than defanging or otherwise childproofing Robinson, DeYoung seems to have taken heed from his lead, and been encouraged to push Friendship far beyond the shuffling mumblecoreisms the premise might have generated: this is not a film that holds back in any way. To Chekhov's gun, DeYoung adds Chekhov's book about ayahuasca; his emboldened plotting becomes more surreal with every scene. The hibernal mists of the early scenes thicken into an abstract haze, pulling us deeper inside this guy's head and nightmare; both the writing and playing drift further and further away from naturalism. Craig is so negligent to the essentials that he literally loses his wife, is hypnotised by a flower arrangement, launches his own one-man marching parade, wanders into the single weirdest instance of product placement I think I've ever seen. (Though even this latter deviation connects back to character: Craig is so unimaginative that even his bad trip can only transport him as far as a branch of Subway.) The approach yields at least one surprising reveal, and a genuine sense of instability: the film, you feel, could go anywhere, and end anyhow. (It could even go dark: this waywardness is why restraining orders get served, and why men die alone.) I suppose you could argue the film does nothing more than put the essence of that show you like on a bigger screen, sustaining its puckish spirit for 100 minutes rather than the twenty of the average episode - but even that's an achievement, harder than one might think to pull off. And DeYoung goes further than I Think You Should Leave in introducing nods and references that tie this story to wider American misadventures initiated by men. Psychologists might well find something in the film's thesis that an entire generation of men aren't learning from their mistakes because they're too busy trying to style them out or cover them up. Here again, DeYoung goes a step beyond: Friendship is the first comedy I've seen for a while that operates at a diagnostic level, almost as a case study. In a better, saner, less belligerent world, men might just leave convinced they've witnessed an unusually funny cautionary tale.

Friendship is now playing in selected cinemas.