Introducing the Most Tim Robinson of Tim Robinson Characters

I saw Friendship in a packed theater at SXSW, sitting next to a stranger who kept moaning “nooooo” under his breath whenever Tim Robinson’s character — a husband, father, and corporate drone named Craig Waterman — was about to do something he shouldn’t. There are plenty of contexts in which this kind of behavior would be annoying. But for this particular film, it was an accompaniment that felt like an enhancement, a live bonus audio track of involuntary secondhand embarrassment. Friendship doesn’t lean into cringe in a way that’s punishing — it’s more that awkwardness is always in its atmosphere, a quality that Craig can’t escape. The movie opens on a meeting of a cancer-survivor support group, where Tami (Kate Mara) is speaking in earnest, fragile tones about being 12 months into remission and still feeling like her life is overshadowed with dread about the disease returning. Then the camera’s focus shifts to Craig, sitting alongside her, as he puts his hand on her thigh and says, “It’s not coming back.” The moment’s like a record scratch. Craig is just trying to be supportive of his wife, and yet it all feels hilariously wrong — the smarmy expression on his face, the studied quality to the gesture, the slightly too long pause between the touch and the reassurance.

Craig’s burden is that he isn’t a true weirdo. He’s just off enough, always misreading the room and telling jokes that fail to land, that the gap between the acceptance he seeks and the way he actually comes off to other people starts driving him to extremes. This is a very Tim Robinson problem to have, and Friendship, the debut from writer-director Andrew DeYoung, feels built around the sort of characters the comedian has played in his sketch-comedy series I Think You Should Leave — ones who think they know the score, only to react with outsize outrage or hurt when they discover that they’re entirely wrong. In that sense, the film doesn’t push Robinson into new territory, but it does give him a worthy platform for his first big-screen starring role. Craig starts off leading a stable (enough) existence, working a corporate job, exchanging platitudes with his teenage son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer), ignoring hints of discontent from Tami, and taking pride in his big accomplishment of getting speed bumps installed on their street. It’s only when Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), a local weatherman who plays in a band, moves in down the street that Craig becomes aware of what he’s missing.

Craig has no friends or a life outside his home and office to speak of. Austin, who collects Bronze Age artifacts and invites Craig on a spontaneous nighttime expedition into the town’s aqueducts and out into the roof of City Hall for a smoke, is downright swashbuckling in Craig’s eyes — a local celeb right there on his suburban street. He represents a world of excitement and new possibilities, and, naturally, Craig starts fucking things up almost immediately. Friendship finds Rudd operating on known turf as well, as an actor who’s at his best playing characters who aren’t as cool as they like to pretend, whether he’s an obnoxious ladies’-man lifeguard in Wet Hot American Summer or an overconfident ladies’-man field reporter in Anchorman. Austin may be happily married, but he’s another big fish in a small pond, which doesn’t stop Craig from hero worshipping him to an agonizingly earnest extent. Friendship is funny when the two men are bonding — Craig indulges in fantasies of how their bond will deepen that run the gamut from carrying Austin after a fall off a ladder to surviving a postapocalyptic future together. But it really gets going when things start souring between them after Craig is invited on what’s essentially an audition to become part of Austin’s boys’ night only to undergo a series of mishaps that escalates from property damage to physical harm, somehow culminating in everyone staring in horror as Craig offers to make amends by cleaning his mouth with soap while bleating, “I’m sowwy.”

Craig is understandable in his desire for connection, but he isn’t remotely sympathetic, which is what makes Friendship tolerable, despite the muttered protests of my Texas seatmate. Robinson has a gift for playing characters who are stultifyingly unexceptional while also being so alien in the choices they make that every action creates a sense of suspense. Friendship often plays like a low-stakes platonic variation on an erotic thriller, or like an update to The Cable Guy in which the Jim Carrey character is the protagonist. Even so, it’s the little comedic cul-de-sacs that make the movie work as well as it does, sustaining it as much as the growing tension between Craig and Austin. A digression involving a teenage dealer working out of a mobile-phone store leads to an amazingly mundane drug-trip sequence, there’s a repeated motif of Craig using Marvel as a noun (“a Marvel,” “that new Marvel”), and Conner O’Malley makes a terrific hollering cameo. If it does end up feeling like an extralong ITYSL sketch, there are worse things to bring to mind — as Craig complains when pointing out that Austin and his friends were too accepting of him too quickly, “People need rules.” Familiarity isn’t a bad thing when the talent involved is this good at it.