They say men are facing a loneliness epidemic; that modern guys, alienated by the vagaries of late capital and the atomization of technology, can’t find community and purpose anymore. Frankly, Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship makes the case that some men build their own prisons without even knowing it: some dudes just aren’t a good hang, and can’t look past their small egos to fix that.
In 2025, there’s no better avatar for that kind of absurd, fractured mirror of suburban manhood than Tim Robinson, who’s leapt from underappreciated SNLwriter and cast member to cult fame with his hit sketch show, I Think You Should Leave. For better and for worse, Friendship feels like a feature-length version of one of that show’s sketches, which often revolve around self-absorbed, myopic guys who struggle against the rules and codes society has laid out for them, and try to lie and squirm their way out of the pickles they land themselves in. DeYoung plops one of Robinson’s signature losers, with their bugged-out eyes and Gollum-esque posture, into an Ari Aster film of his own making: I Love You, Man meetsOne Hour Photo.
From the opening minutes, we instantly clock Robinson’s Craig Waterman, a corporate drone who specializes in making clients’ products more addictive (“We prefer the term ‘habit-forming’,” he helpfully says early on), as wholly ill-equipped for the life he’s living. At a support group, he sits next to his patient wife Tami (Kate Mara), a cancer survivor, recounting her year of remission and her sexual struggles therein; he can’t help but crack a dad joke that makes it all about him. (“I’m orgasming just fine!”) You instantly get the vibe her problem is not the cancer, and clue in on one of Friendship’s most bizarre elements: That Tami would find someone like Craig attractive in the first place, much less father a child with him (Jack Dylan Grazer’s oddly affectionate Steven).
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Hope springs for the lonely Craig, though, when a misdelivered package sends him into the orbit of Austin (Paul Rudd), a charming, mustachioed local weatherman who instantly takes a shine to him. (Between the bromance premise and Austin’s look/occupation, DeYoung is winking deliberately at some of Rudd’s most famous comic roles.) Craig, feeding desperately off those initial crumbs of attention, strikes an immediate friendship, and soon the two are inseparable. But in his first hang with Austin’s larger friend group, he fumbles hard (especially his apology, in which he shoves a bar of soap in his mouth and mumbles “I’m sowwy!”) and Austin ices him out.
It’s in this post-friend-breakup world, where Craig feels even more adrift than normal, that Friendship takes its nastiest and most bonkers direction. For the most part, it’s nastily effective, especially given that it all centers around Robinson’s willingness to push his unlikability to the edge. There’s a twisted Willy Loman logic to the disintegration of Craig’s life, as he pathetically tries on Austin’s interests and affections like a suit in his absence: artifact collecting, going on “adventures” through the city’s aqueducts.
But the more his obsession with Austin’s self-styled cool grows, the more inappropriate his gestures become, and the greater their impact on the people around him. Robinson hits these notes with incredible consistency, which is really DeYoung’s gambit: How can you fashion a full story around someone with such little interior life that what should be a life-changing drug trip only scares up a half-remembered dream about ordering a sandwich at Subway?
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Friendship (A24)
After a while, the returns do diminish, with a few welcome breaks from one-scene wonders like Conner O’Malley and Josh Segarra to give Craig new targets for his impotent rage. Mara is icy and inscrutable, which is perhaps the point, but her relationship with Craig is at such a remove it’s hard to see how they even got there.
But that consistency is the point:Friendship is a Greek tragedy about a man whose Achilles heel is his own inability to back down or read the room. He wants to be loved so badly, but can’t overcome his staggering inadequacies. It’s as if fate planted him in this cushy middle-class position, then gave him zero tools to wriggle out of it. “You made me feel too free,” Craig whines to Austin after he learns he’s persona non grata. The ultimate lesson, basically, is that he never should have been given a glimpse of something better in the first place.
If Robinson’s style of humor puts you off already, rest assured thatFriendship doesn’t break his existing comic bold. But for those shirt brothers in the Tim Robinson cult already, the Dan Flashes buyers and zipline pullers among us,Friendshipoffers next-level cringe packaged in something far more Kaufmanesque than his usual fare.
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Friendship cringes its way into limited release May 9th, with a nationwide release May 23rd. Check out the trailer below.
