‘Friendship’ Review: Netflix Funnyman Tim Robinson Conquers the Big Screen in a Squirmy Bro-Com Co-Starring Paul Rudd

Having successfully built a devoted following as a leading purveyor of cringe comedy with his hit Netflix sketch series, I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson, the show’s rubber-faced star/co-creator ups his game with the innocently titled Friendship, a gleefully discomfiting portrait of male bonding that delivers some of the year’s biggest laughs.

Robinson navigates an extremely fine line between lovable goof and creepy psycho in writer-director Andrew DeYoung’s fearless first feature, playing a klutzy man-child of a suburban dad whose everyman demeanor becomes short-circuited after being taken under the wing of a friendly neighbor (Paul Rudd).

Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to land the always game Rudd as the object of one’s obsession. Rudd is himself no stranger to bromantic comedies, having starred in 2009’s I Love You, Man, which plays like innocuous fluff in comparison to DeYoung and Robinson’s no-holds-barred approach to the subject. Receiving its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Midnight Madness selection should have no problem bonding with a niche distributor.

At initial glance, Robinson’s Craig Waterman would appear to be in a good place in life: He has a decent job as a program manager at a digital marketing company, busy florist wife Tami (a delightfully deadpan Kate Mara), and attentive teenage son Stevie (Jack Dylan Grazer). Granted, he has an odd style sense, limited solely to the output of a clothing company called Ocean View Dining, right down to his trusty, oversized brown puffer coat. He’s also given to inopportune nosebleeds, and can be a bit of a kvetch, known to utter the words, “Ow! I got water on me!”

But his reasonably unremarkable life is upended when a misdelivered package brings him to the home of new neighbor Austin Carmichael (Rudd), a rather shaggy TV weatherman with a porn mustache and a soft spot for Craig’s oddball personality. In short order, Austin brings Craig into his social orbit, inviting him to see his rock band perform, going mushroom foraging and taking him on a subterranean trek through an abandoned aqueduct beneath City Hall.

When the budding relationship is stopped in its tracks by Craig’s troublingly obsessive behavior, Austin announces, “I don’t wish to accept this friendship at the moment.” But he soon finds out it’s not so easy to put the cork back into the bottle, inevitably setting the stage for an unpleasant showdown.

Prior to his boundary-nudging eponymous Netflix series, Robinson, sort of like Steve Carrell, Gene Wilder and Chris Farley all rolled into one, cut his satirical teeth as a writer and performer for several seasons on Saturday Night Live (2012-2016), giving him a solid basis in character-building. He knows exactly how far to take sad sack Craig to the edge of weirdness before reeling him in just in time to cling on to viewer good will.

Rudd, in what is more of a supporting role here, nevertheless adds another memorable portrayal to his roster of mischief-makers, playing against his wholesome good looks. His rough-around-the-edges Austin Carmichael might easily have been a parallel universe version of Anchorman’s Brian Fantana.

Coaxing the best from his cast, writer-director DeYoung opts for a pace that favors the languid over the frantic. And while that’s a good fit for the characters, the film doesn’t serve much of a plot; at times, a more traditional, cranked-up approach would have been preferable, especially in the last act.

Nevertheless, the joint big-screen arrival of the Robinson/DeYoung duo ushers in a future for both that is anything but sketchy.