There’s something about Paul Rudd that calls out, befriend me. Rudd doesn’t always portray the boyish nice guy; he can also embody a dork, a sarcastic wiseass, a petulant malcontent, or an outright boor. Yet, through these various roles, he typically maintains a kind of chumminess, whether with his costars, his audience, or both. Even in his movies with Judd Apatow, where he is often allowed to reveal his character’s most embarrassing weaknesses and flaws, there’s always something naturally conspiratorial, sometimes bordering on confessional, about him. He’s not a natural loner.

The comedian Tim Robinson, in contrast, has a demeanor designed to make one hesitate; that’s the whole foundation for I Think You Should Leave, his cult sketch-comedy series that has aired for three seasons on Netflix. Robinson frequently portrays characters who are desperate for the kind of camaraderie that comes easily to someone like Paul Rudd, yet too tortured by their own ambitions, self-awareness, or ineptitude to seamlessly integrate into social circles. Regardless of what his characters attempt, they’re almost always pushing, overreaching, or overstepping some invisible yet obvious boundary. Hence, the show’s blunt title.

The disparity between these two personas essentially underlies the premise of the more gently titled Friendship, Robinson’s first film as a lead: Paul Rudd is a natural buddy, and Tim Robinson is not. Robinson portrays Craig, a seemingly mild-mannered husband to Tami (Kate Mara) and father to a good-natured teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer). He meets his new neighbor Austin (Rudd) and, at Tami’s urging, tries to befriend him. However, after a promising beginning, Craig disrupts their budding friendship at a disastrous get-together with Austin’s other friends and spirals as he faces social rejection. The audience better grasps that sting when he’s been rejected by someone as charming as Rudd. It’s akin to watching an I Love You, Man-style bromance abruptly derail.

In fact, Friendship is very much a Charlie Kaufman-style nightmare version of I Love You, Man, where Rudd has been promoted from awkward goofball to default alpha, and the awkward goofball who moves in to take his place is wracked with vastly greater unspoken anxieties. The new film is also basically an I Think You Should Leave sketch stretched to many times its typical lifespan; the show typically produces a half-dozen 15-minute episodes per run, which means there’s as much Robinson in this 90-minute movie as in an entire season of his sketch show. Strangely, writer-director Andrew DeYoung has nothing to do with that series, though he has directed episodes of some TV vehicles for Robinson’s fellow SNL alumni like Vanessa Bayer (I Love That For You) and Aidy Bryant (Shrill). Those shows also used their stars’ broad-comedy experience to dig into social mores and awkwardness; similarly, Friendship differentiates itself from its sketch-comedy counterpart by going deeper into the abyss of male loneliness.

It’s a topic that comes up a lot when trying to diagnose the ills of the podcast “manosphere,” Trump and Trump-adjacent voters, and adolescent dysfunction: the social isolation and foolish expectations that leave men craving some kind of connection (and open to any number of disturbing, often misogynist philosophies). None of that bubbles up through Friendship, not directly; Craig’s son is sweetly (if ever-so-slightly disturbingly) close to Tami, who is a recent cancer survivor, and Craig himself fantasizes about playing in Austin’s band or being cool enough to ditch his cell phone. He’s not aspiring to reclaim some image of lost masculinity.

Or is he, without realizing it? Part of the movie’s hilarious heartbreak is how clearly this relationship with Austin amplifies Craig’s stresses about his own worth. With his tolerant family and the coworkers who clearly don’t care for him, he’s able to get by, if not especially happily. Through the desire for approval from other men, he radicalizes his own anxiety, no longer containing it with a passable imitation of normie enthusiasm. Pre-Austin, he suggests taking his family to see “a new Marvel” that’s supposedly “nuts”; in a delightfully meta touch, A24 released Friendship just a week after Marvel’s Thunderbolts, which in turn vaguely recalls when Knocked Up had Rudd name-check Spider-Man 3 while it was still in theaters. Though Robinson is the lead, the whole thing is a weirdly Ruddy text; Austin is also a mustachioed weather man for the local news, recalling the actor’s Anchorman reporting gig.

Despite the Rudd bona fides, Austin is kind of an oddball, too – the deadpan weirdness of Friendship’s other characters keep it from becoming a cringe-only humiliation-fest (though there are plenty of cringes to go around). Somehow, the other men in the movie are able to pass as functional adult bros, smoothing over the pettiness and hostility that clearly lies below the surface. Even in their tender moments, these people are strange, at one point soothing a friend’s nervousness over his growing daughter by breaking into a group rendition of “My Boo” by Ghost Town DJs. But for whatever reason, Austin and his friends accept each other’s quirks, and when Craig tries to crack the code, he just winds up breaking things. As soon as a friendship with Austin (and Austin’s whole Paul Rudd deal) becomes aspirational, he starts to unravel in a manner reminiscent of a man gone mad with desire.

Notably, Craig never makes so much of a glance in the direction of another woman; to the extent that he seems interested in anyone romantically, it’s only his wife, though he’s not selfless enough to scan as a Wife Guy. His puppyish devotion (and, later, frustration) all targets Austin. This again brings to mind I Love You, Man, which was its own cute little statement on male loneliness, through the mechanics of a romantic comedy; in that movie, Rudd and Jason Segel essentially fall in platonic love, break up, overcome obstacles, and reunite as committed besties. Friendship isn’t as wink-wink cutesy in equating adult friendship with romance, instead depicting it as a generator of relentless need that’s startlingly childlike, with stalkerish overtones. Craig simply can’t get his brain to conceive of an easy, relaxing friendship where both parties support each other while enjoying each other’s company. It needs to feed something, some deeper void within him, whether that’s been bred into Craig via gender roles, or simply a singular emptiness.

This is where the movie’s lack of explicit connection to the worst of 2025 masculinity becomes a stealth advantage. Typically, toxic masculinity is framed to include forms of stoicism, competitiveness, and insensitivity. There are faint strains of those things in Friendship – Craig is certainly insensitive to the needs of others, because he’s so finely calibrated to re-center them around his own desires – but it also recognizes that male dysfunction can grow even without a simmering hatred of women. As such, Friendship may prove surprisingly relatable to those who feel blessedly free of toxic-male grievance while recognizing how inadequacies can still nag at us. Paul Rudd might seem like a workable everyman figure, yet even with a mustache and a few humiliations of his own, that bastard has baseline levels of handsomeness and charm most of us will never attain. Tim Robinson, on the other hand, communes with the male ego ensuring we’ll never stop yearning for it anyway.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.