Friendship: a quest for companionship spirals out of control in this funny, torturous take on the buddy movie

In a support group for cancer survivors, Tami (Kate Mara), openly and gravely describes how she has slowly returned to normalcy, save one salient detail: she is unable to achieve orgasm. The camera pulls back slightly to reveal her husband, Craig (Tim Robinson), left jittery and slack-jawed by the admission. He reassures the room in a blindingly improper tone that he is having no such issues. 

This irreverent, nearly psychosexual feeling hangs over Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship, a propulsive and remarkable bizarro comedy that occasionally succumbs to its sketch-like structure. The Watermans – Craig, Tami and their adolescent son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer) – are in the process of selling their home, but their dynamic instantly feels lopsided. When she’s not out for drinks with her firefighter ex-boyfriend, Tami runs a florist business out of their kitchen – a veritable jungle of foliage and ribbons packed haphazardly into a hatch — back – with the assistance of Steven, who has a confounding habit of kissing his mother on the lips. 

Craig works at a “habit-forming” tech firm, which concocts methods of making apps addictive to their users, a profession that mimics the compulsive nature of his imminent spiral. When a misaddressed package arrives at their doorstep, Craig is tasked with returning it to the rightful recipient down the block: Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), a suave local meteorologist who manages to seduce Craig into a hang-out at his home, outfitted with mounted guitars, books on Mondrian, and (allegedly) ancient stones. In this inverted take on I Love You, Man (2009), which starred Rudd as the withdrawn suburbanite, Austin is charming and resolute, like a team-captain high-school boyfriend. 

While Craig is fragile and risk averse – his drab clothes all come from the fictional brand ‘Ocean View Dining’ (which A24 is now selling) – Austin moves with the out-and-out conviction of a cult leader. The difference between the pair begins to shrink, at least in Craig’s borderline amorous view, the more time they spend together. But after a vicious faux pas at a boys’ night with Austin’s friends, Craig finds himself exiled from the group. His fixation on Austin balloons into social catastrophe: stalking, thieving, imitation and tantrums, played to cringe perfection by the American comedian. 

Robinson is most closely associated with his sketch comedy series (co-created with Zach Kanin), I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (2019-), home to brash, absurd concepts like ‘Coffin Flop’, ‘The Driving Crooner’, and the fedora with safari flaps at the back – producing a kind of shorthand for the terminally online that circulates well through popeyed images of Robinson in hilariously distressing contexts. DeYoung similarly cut his teeth on small-screen comedies, directing episodes of PEN15 and Shrill (both 2019-21) and Our Flag Means Death (2022-23). That perhaps explains Friendship’s resemblance to an extended sketch, with Robinson playing the same flavour of off-putting recluse that populates his repertoire. 

In Friendship, his first feature, DeYoung wields Robinson’s strained temperament and aptitude for hysteria and self-debasement like a switchblade. The downside of this format is that character details are dragged out sans explanation to facilitate a single gag – an example is Tami’s cancer, introduced at the start and never again addressed. 

DeYoung has cited Paul Thomas Anderson’s homosocial epic The Master (2013) as a touchstone for the project, but that seems true in the most superficial sense: suburbia as cult, male friendships as homoerotically charged. Unlike Freddie Quell, the Joaquin Phoenix character in that film, his pathetic disposition cancels out his rage, making him appear infantile even when waving a handgun. (Directors might be better off not admitting such lofty aims: the only result is to make one want to rewatch The Master.) 

Friendship is more plausibly – if surprisingly – in conversation with John Waters’ Polyester (1981), in which suburbanite drag is a performance carried out with both playful reverence and contempt. While DeYoung (and, by extension, Robinson) are wreaking havoc on the persona of the stale husband-father – tempestuously exaggerating its design to fit the emotional beats of melodrama and psycho — logical horror – they are also engaging in a rewriting of normie ideals, at once lampooning and embracing male loneliness. 

In a moment of rare sincerity, Tami calls Craig a narcissist, which he is, but this might have never occurred to us, engrossed in a spectacle of staged masculinity that seems to transcend real-life emotions. The film is essentially a rolling punishment for this family man, who cannot free himself from the hollow prospect of companionship. Friendship is impressive precisely for its fluid approach to genre, contorting from comedy into drama, fantasy, tragedy, thriller – even if the bit exhausts itself at times.

► Friendship is in UK cinemas 18 July.