Friendship is a wonderful, witty and at times unsettling vision of what has sometimes been described as the male loneliness epidemic. In the hands of writer-director Andrew DeYoung, this takes the form of a post-bromance, and a revision of 2009’s I Love You, Man in particular. Bromances were one of the last major multiplex genres, other than superhero films, and their decline mirrors an American public sphere where everyday sociality between men seems to have waned. DeYoung’s film revolves around a middle-aged man, Craig, played by Tim Robinson, who yearns for friendship everywhere he goes. In part that’s because he has grown apart from his wife, Tami, played by Kate Mara, and finds it hard to connect with his son, Steven, played by Jack Dylan Grazer. But things aren’t bad enough that he needs friendship as a mere substitute either. Instead, DeYoung suggests that male friendship is important on its own terms and has largely vanished from the textures of American middle-class life. Everywhere he goes Craig tries to make friends, whether it’s asking a phone store clerk out for a drink simply because they like the same iPhone case, or pitching a campaign for a political candidate in which voters see him first and foremost as a friend: “What do people want more than anything in the world?” “A good relationship.” In Craig’s world, making new male friends is even harder than dating.

All of that changes, however, when Craig meets Austin, played by Paul Rudd, a weather reporter who lives up the street. Despite living within sight of each others’ houses for years, Craig has never crossed paths with Austin, or had any reason to. When he receives a package meant for Austin, however, the two strike up a rapport, which leads to Austin inviting Craig over for a night together, an evening that becomes the moment of mystical male friendship that Craig has always wanted. First, the two men hang out in Craig’s living room, talking about life and aspirations. Then, Craig suggests an adventure – clambering through the local sewer system and eventually coming out in City Hall. These sewers feel like a throwback to an older nocturnal homosocial infrastructure, a whole nightlife that once serviced male friendship, and that has now receded underground, into the realm of the abject, the criminal and the antisocial. We sense this older masculine nightsprawl when Craig and Austin recline on the balcony of City Hall, the town spread out in soft focus beneath them, like a relic of the past. This moment of communion leads to a second adventure, when Austin spontaneously pulls Craig out of work, and then the most sublime experience of all – the night when Craig is invited into Austin’s friend circle, and witnesses them sharing their fears and vulnerability, before all they break out in spontaneous song as a gesture of shared intimacy.

It’s at this moment that Craig formulates his fantasy most directly: “I can see the future, it’s full of pals, helping pals.” Yet this is also a counter-factual, foreclosed future, in which Craig’s vision of his friendship circle gradually segues into sci-fi, culminating in them defending the last residues of society against an apocalyptic encroachment. It’s the counter-factuality of Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, some of the better Marvel films, and all of the other movies that remain so vital amongst young men, even those who are not cinephiles, since they envisage a world displaced enough from the here and now to provide healthy masculine role models and communal attachments. It’s no coincidence that Craig continually resorts to Marvel films in an effort to form male connections, including with his own son, but it’s late enough in the MCU cycle now that these gestures are largely impotent. Instead, he has to articulate his own science fiction vision of the friendship-future, one so enormous that it overwhelms him, and cannot ever be fully satiated or realised: “I’m on the edge of life and the view is gorgeous.”

That might make Friendship sound like a particularly plangent film, and for long sections it is, as a lush synth score follows Craig’s gaze as it continually recurs up the street to Austin’s house. But DeYoung also accommodates Robinson’s bizarre sense of humour so brilliantly that it’s hard to believe Robinson himself didn’t write the script. About half the time Robinson’s sketch show I Think You Should Leave is riotously funny and about half the time it’s just plan strange and the comedy depends partly upon the alternation between those two registers. Friendship is just as strange – so strange, in fact, that you never quite get on its wavelength, or get used to its style, which makes the opening act especially startling. Conceptually, it feels like the bromance that Craig longs for has now become incoherent in the 2020s, turning what would have been a feel-good film in the Judd Apatow era into a fractured kaleidoscope of tonalities that shift queasily between comedy and horror. Sometimes Craig’s effort to form a friendship are funny but sometimes the impact of not succeeding in friendships are horrifying – a glimpse of the entire manosphere, in its recessive and nerdy incarnation, as a reaction against the waning of a certain masculine public sphere in America, for better but also for worse.

The structure of the film revolves around this single night of male camaraderie, which increasingly takes on a dream logic – or feels like a dream in retrospect – percolating out in a variety of different directions, some of which evolve into fully-formed narrative threads, some of which remain unresolved, and some of which take on a more surreal and hallucinatory note. Again, it’s as if McCarthy is registering that the central trope of the 2000s bromance no longer ramifies except as a productive incoherence, like an isotope that decays the moment that you construct it. These different manifestations of the dream-bromance reach a crisis when Craig takes Tami into the sewers, in an attempt to graft the nocturnal infrastructure of male friendship back onto his marriage, only for her to disappear, and render visible the aporia at the core of the film’s vision of bromance. Much of the third act revolves around the atonalities that spill out from Tami’s disappearance and recovery, for when she returns the last residues of cohesion have also vanished from her marriage to Craig. You feel that the balance between friendship and romance have shifted irrevocably, making both relationships unfamiliar, uncalibrated against each other, producing a remarkably open-ended quality.

At first it seems like Friendship might go down one of several more conventional roots to resolve that open-endedness. On the one hand, Craig initially seems to opt for a toxic sigma self-sufficiency, insisting that “I’m a lone wolf and I accept that” and lamenting that “This is why guys shouldn’t have friends – it’ll get you in a ton of trouble.” Even this possible solution, familiar as it is, is interesting in the way it diagnoses the rise of the sigma male as a symptom of a public sphere where the decline of male friendship has pitted men against each other in new and destructive ways. On the other hand, Craig also seems to fall back into the traditional dichotomy between and hierarchization of the relationship between family and friendship; that is, rebranding himself as a family man who has put away the childish things of friendship. We see this when he welcomes Tami back into their home (“it’s really nice to have you back in the house”) and in his mantra that “if you want a pal, have a son.” Between these two options, a certain kind of prescribed masculine conventionalism emerges; lone wolf on the streets, family man in the sheets, with no possibility of friendship as a middle term.

And yet, to its credit, the film is unable or unwilling to completely repress friendship either. In a final epilogue, Craig heads out for an errand, sees that Austin is hosting a night for his buddies and, most importantly, sees that Austin has bought the yellow sports car that he always envisaged at the centre of his friendship-fantasies about the two of them. Once again, the fantasy of friendship is tantalizingly close, so Craig goes inside, and yet this sparks the most hallucinatory and atonal sequence of the entire film, along with the most vertiginous schism between horror and comedy. It’s prefigured in the grating trajectory with which Craig drives up the hill when he spots the sports car, mounting the curb, travelling along the sidewalk and eventually come to a halting stop. Once inside, he pulls out Austin’s gold-plated gun, which he stole during an eccentric home invasion in the second act, and holds Austin and his friends at gunpoint in an effort to make conversation. Up to a point, this horror-comedy could become its own conventional exercise in satirical atonality, but the genius of this closing scene is that a tender core of friendship remains against all odds. In the scuffle for the gun, Craig accidentally knocks off Austin’s toupee, and as the only member of his friendship circle who knows about the dark secret of this weatherman’s baldness, he waves the gun around enough to keep the other men on the ground until Austin can restore his hairpiece and retain his pride.

Hence the amazing ending, in which Craig is bundled into a police car, and Austin turns around from his friends, who are conferring and recovering in the garage, to slip him a sly wink in acknowledgment of their shared secret. Despite all the ways that this friendship has skewed comically and horrifically, a core of tenderness persists, along with an ingenuous longing for male camaraderie and connection that lights up Craig’s face in the closing image of the film. It’s a daring and poignant vision of a version of male friendship that somehow remains despite an American public sphere that has worked against in so many ways. And in that sense the genius of Friendship is to imagine male friendship precisely as something whose tonalities cannot be properly regulated or calibrated properly against other relationships, let alone codified in terms of the Hal Ashby-esque moment of the 00s bromance, now in retrospect one of the last great multiplex genres. Ultimately, Friendship is both an elegy for that moment, a tentative act of survival, and a moving gesture of hope.