Craig Waterman is a suburban dad in middle age who favors extremely puffy jackets, yearns to see the new Marvel movie and is so uncool that he lobbies his town to have speed bumps installed. Naturally, he has no friends.
That changes one day when a misdirected package arrives in the mail and he trots off to hand deliver it to his new neighbor, Austin Carmichael, who has a ’70s vibe — a mustache, soul patch and a neckerchief. He’s a TV weatherman and fronts a punk band. Naturally, he has a tight group of male friends.
So begins Andrew DeYoung’s auspicious debut feature “Friendship,” which tackles modern masculinity and male loneliness with biting satire and humor, taking detours into horror and the surreal.
Craig (Tim Robinson, at his awkward best) is instantly smitten — platonically — by Austin (Paul Rudd, at his charismatic best) and why would he not? The neighbor is everything Craig is not. Craig is like one of those loser characters in the Progressive Insurance commercials about not becoming your parents. “It’s a school night for me!” he’ll announce when the party is just getting started.
“Might be nice to have a pal, a bud,” suggests Craig’s wife, a wonderful Kate Mara, who is drifting away from her husband. His teenage son is, too. You would be as well if your dad ended a conversation with “Stay curious!”
Craig soon comes under Austin’s spell — the pair smoking, going on an adventure to an aqueduct at night, looking at his collection of early human tools, foraging for mushrooms, some light boxing and singing along with his friends to an an impromptu a cappella version of “My Boo” by Ghost Town DJ’s.
Craig falls hard, fantasizing about joining his neighbor’s band and back slapping with his new band of brothers. “You make me feel so free,” he confesses to his cool neighbor. But he doesn’t have the skills to play it cool. As the kids today say, he has no rizz.
DeYoung is at his best here, exploring the slippery notions of masculinity, both tender and muscular, and the difficulty of joining a circle of guys with their own idiosyncratic and iron laws. “Friendship” shows Craig aping his man-crush and failing terribly — and bringing down the object of his bromance at the same time. It’s as if Larry David remade “Single White Female.”
Most impressive is that DeYoung has not created a collection of connected “SNL” skits. Each part cleverly feeds to another, with echoes throughout the script. If a muscle car is mentioned at the top, you’ll know you’ll find a muscle car by the end. Same with a lick or sliding doors.
DeYoung also has things to say about our commercial-saturated times, where even Craig’s desperate attempt to get super high and escape his disintegrating life ends with a pedestrian hallucination where he just orders from a fast food joint.
Craig orders his clothes from a catalogue bizarrely called “Ocean View Dining” — “The only brand of clothes that fit me just right,” he crows — and his adoration of Marvel shows a lowest-common denominator thinking. (The fact that the object of his love-jealousy is played by Ant-Man — a member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — is a remarkable piece of kismet.)
But there’s also a feeling in the second half of the movie that DeYoung isn’t sure how to end this slide into insanity and the movie gets unmoored from its satirical look at bromances and just follows Craig as a one man wrecking machine, like the movie was hijacked by Charlie Kaufman.
Not to take anything away from DeYoung’s debut, which is a hoot. Do us all a favor and see it with your buddies. And if you see a guy there all alone, maybe reach out?
“Friendship,” a A24 release that is in select theaters Friday and goes wider May 23, is rated R for “language and some drug content.” Running time: 100 minutes. Three stars out of four.
