I was delighted to be able to request “Two tickets to Friendship, please!” at my local box office last weekend, which may have been the most fun I’ve had ordering movie tickets since requesting “Two tickets to the Moon, please!” in 2009. Part of the fun in this case was seeing the movie with my own best friend, as part of a leisurely Saturday afternoon enjoying movies & cocktails in the French Quarter. According to general online punditry, that kind of easy-going male friendship is a modern anomaly. We are reportedly in the middle of a “Male Loneliness Epidemic” that I’ve luckily avoided by A. occasionally leaving my house and B. maintaining a semi-social hobby (movies! movies! movies!). Having to restart my ongoing friendships from scratch in middle age does sound like a total nightmare scenario, though, as painfully illustrated by the Tim Robinson & Paul Rudd buddy comedy we watched that afternoon. In Friendship, Robinson stars as a lonely office worker who relies on his wife & son for the entirety of his social life until he’s encouraged to leave the house & make friends with the new neighbor, played by Rudd. Robinson’s mental health delicately balances on this new friendship going well, which makes for great comedic tension as he repeatedly, spectacularly fucks it up. By the end, it’s clear that his Male Loneliness affliction is entirely self-inflicted, making Friendship a cautionary tale for anyone who tends to overthink low-pressure hangouts into high-tension social bomb scares. It’s got all the raw-nerve social tension of an I Think You Should Leave sketch, sustained for 100 minutes of top-volume cringe.

Friendship is consistently funny in the exact way you’d expect a Tim Robinson vehicle to be, with three or four standout gags that had me laughing to the point of temporary mania. To avoid spoiling those gags, I will simply highlight them with single-syllable prompts: soap, sewer, toad, Jimp. The humor is immediate as soon as you lay your eyes on Robinson’s milquetoast narcissist, dressed head to toe in a harshly limited range of beiges & browns. He needlessly fills his coffee mug to the very brim, precariously carrying it down the hallways of his office with constant warnings that his hot coffee is in danger of spilling & scalding with any minor swerve. It’s an entirely self-created problem, which carries over to how he fumbles the easy, low-stakes social heist of being friendly with his new neighbor. Like Mr. Bean walking into a crowded antiques store, the laughter starts well before he fucks up, since I Think You Should Leave audiences are already familiar with the ways Robinson’s characters escalate low-stakes social interactions into acts of communal terrorism. Surprisingly, though, the title of the picture is not entirely ironic. In the chaos of Robinson burning down his marriage, his rapport with his teenage son, and his social standing with the much cooler, more popular Rudd, he does manage to make a genuinely friendly, intimate connection with the other man over a shared secret, communicated with a wink. Rudd can’t socially afford to acknowledge that connection in public, since Robinson is so disastrously inept at being around other people, but the connection is there, and it’s oddly sweet.

As a post-Tim & Eric anti-comedy of manners, Friendship speaks to an acquired taste for which I happen to be in the exact right demographic. If you belong in the bracket of irony-poisoned weirdos who know Conner O’Malley by name and would be delighted to see a film soundtracked by SlipKnot and Ghost Town DJs, you already know this is a comedy you’ll enjoy. If any one of those pop culture references mean nothing to you, congratulations on not being a maladjusted Millennial ghoul; you’re likely better off. All I can report at this point without recounting my favorite individual gags in the style of “The Chris Farley Show” is to say that I had a lot of fun laughing throughout the movie with my friend. Then we left the theater for another round. It’s not that serious if you don’t put pressure on it to be serious.

-Brandon Ledet