It has become increasingly common since the COVID-19 pandemic for stories, think pieces, podcast episodes, TikTok clips, studies, surveys, and all manner of media detritus to be made on the current state of adult friendship and an apparent “loneliness epidemic.” Why are people feeling so lonely, more so now than ever before?

Despite how it’s been characterized, this “epidemic” is not a novel phenomenon unique to one generation or isolated to a “post-pandemic” moment in time. It’s a decades old trend in declining social connection, according to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Still, the discourse surrounding this supposed epidemic comes with the usual nervy energy of Internet-brained discussion: if this is a crisis, then it must have a solution, and its causes must be easily condensed into digestible bullet points.

This reduction of the complexities of human relationships into basic cause-effect bullet points (we are more lonely…because technology!) is a useful entry point into the warped psychology of friendship in the Tim Robinson-Paul Rudd two-hander Friendship. It is the first feature from Andrew DeYoung, who’s had his fingers in the comedy scene for over a decade and has worked with a wide array of alternative comedy staples (Kate Berlant, John Early, Eric Andre, Jon Glazer, to name a few).

DeYoung captures the nervy energy of the “loneliness crisis” and initially presents the struggle to attain lasting adult friendship as seemingly as simple as a bullet point list of action items. Craig Waterman (Robinson) is a loving husband and father who works a stuffy office job (in a corporate perversion of Robinson’s Detroiters character, Craig works at a firm that tries to get people addicted to phone apps). Instead of having a social life, Craig sits in a chair every night and attempts to rope his family into seeing the next nuts Marvel movie with him.

When faced with a potential fraternizing interlocutor in the form of new neighbor Austin (Rudd), Craig’s mental calculations for how to win friends and influence people go over board. Austin mentions in passing that he doesn’t have a phone, so Craig ditches his cell phone. Austin is in a band, so Craig purchases a full drum set in matching color to Austin’s guitar. Craig’s quiet neurosis over successfully winning Austin over eventually come to a head at a “boy’s night” in Austin’s garage, where Craig makes an increasingly embarrassing display of faux pas that ostracizes him from the group. When Austin officially breaks the friendship off, Craig cracks.

You may recognize Robinson from his Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave. It’s a great show full of unhinged anti-comedy. We see a slightly similar version of Robinson in Craig, but the comedy here is far less silly in its absurdity. Craig’s mental descent is your classic trainwreck in slow motion. And while much of the film moved the audience in my screening to laughter, the comedy here is purposefully troubled. The unspoken darkness seeping across Craig’s mind is both funny and disturbing. The tightrope act DeYoung accomplishes with the tone is impressive, as an audience of the right comedic temperament will adore this whacked out odyssey through suburban psychosis.

I was one of those adorers. The film never really touches down on anything meaningful to say about adult male loneliness, and it is almost certainly better for it. We understand the exasperation Craig is feeling, but we only ever recognize his actions to be patently misguided and motivated by hubris. If nothing else, Friendship makes the conflict of its title feel childish and the crisis it alludes to feel oversized and over-determined. By thumbing its nose at the idea of loneliness, the narrative feels slight, to the point where the bombast of the final moments are more of an unresolved murmur than a final stamp on this character’s twisted journey.

At the same time, the descent toward this conclusion is morbidly fascinating to watch. Not only does DeYoung take a careful approach to the film visually—there is something trance-inducing about watching a be-coated Craig march over the speed bump to Austin’s house again and again. But the comedy is a rubbernecking event that doesn’t get old and rarely feels heavy-handed. It is a rare instance where I find joy in what is sometimes called the “superiority theory” of humor. The premise here is simple: we laugh, because we know Craig’s choices are terrible and we would never make them. We are better than Craig, so we laugh. It is an inherently mean-spirited form of comedy, which makes it all the more difficult to pull off. Friendship does it better than most. Some may call it the feel-bad comedy of the year, but I felt pretty good coming out of it.

Friendship: B+

---

As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)