Tim Robinson on the Big Screen
Review: Friendship (2025). Directed by Andrew DeYoung, Starring Tim Robinson & Paul Rudd.
It’s been six years since I Think You Should Leave first premiered on Netflix, but the memes for Tim Robinson’s sketch comedy show are still going strong. My personal favorite is a gif of Robinson in a safari flap fedora. A prosecutor offscreen reads his colleagues’ text exchanges aloud. The image is captioned with a phrase Robinson mutters under his breath as the texts digress from insider trading to poking fun at his new hat: what the hell? Somehow his countenance conveys both surprise at being roasted in the middle of the trial and refusal to believe the fedora is anything other than a fashion outlier when donned atop his head. Like other gifs from the show, there are a surprising number of contexts in which his expression articulates a feeling your standard emoji can’t quite convey. With the release of his new film, Friendship, that man in the safari flap fedora has officially migrated from smartphone group chats to the big screen.
Robinson stars as Craig Waterman, a marketing executive who lives a comfortable life in a nondescript northeastern suburb with his wife, Tami, and their son, Steven. Tami (played by Kate Mara) is a professional florist and cancer survivor who is absurdly out of Craig’s league – a fact writer-director Andrew DeYoung underlines with Tami’s offhand references to intimate conversations with her close friend and ex-boyfriend, Devon. Even Steven, a trope of Gen-Z cultural prowess (played by Jack Dylan Grazer), is a mystery to Craig. His biggest struggle, besides trying to appease his overbearing father, is affording two girlfriends. At work things are no better; his subordinates cut him out of conversations during smoke breaks and mock his marketing pitches.
From what we can gather, Craig has found a way to exist in the twenty-first century sans meaningful connections with other human beings, family included. But, when a package gets misdelivered to his house, a new hope emerges. Craig takes the package to the correct address down the street where he meets his dreamy new neighbor Austin (played by Paul Rudd). For whatever reason, Austin – a local weatherman and punk rocker – immediately takes a liking to Craig and invites him to hang. Austin is Craig’s platonic ideal of cool. On their first outing, he reveals a penchant for collecting rare paleolithic tools, leads Craig on an adventure through an underground network of tunnels, and takes him trespassing onto the roof of city hall. The next morning, they go foraging for wild mushrooms.
Before long Craig starts adopting all of Austin’s habits and interests as his own. When Tami walks in on him blasting punk music and sauteing wild mushrooms in their kitchen, she’s taken aback. “You never listen to music.” Steven is similarly skeptical. But the important thing is that Craig is glowing for the first time in years. Or, as he puts it: “I’m on the edge of life, and the view is gorgeous.”
Eventually, Austin invites Craig over to hang out with his other male friends and is granted access to that most cherished of male settings: the bonding circle. While seated together in Austin’s garage, the fellas break out into an acapella rendition of My Boo by Ghost Town DJs that nearly brings Craig to tears. He gets a taste of what real male friendship could offer him. Then things take a turn.
Austin pulls out a set of cushioned helmets and boxing gloves for some friendly sparring and invites Craig to box with him. After taking two hits to the face, the men suggest Craig take a break to recover. Boxing over. Then, out of nowhere, Craig throws two punches, knocking his generous host to the floor, much to the group’s dismay. Realizing his faux pas, but being too aloof to apologize, Craig deflects with a misguided attempt at humor: he shoves a bar of soap in his mouth and plays at being a bad boy who needs to be chastised for his behavior. His sudden coquettish demeanor is even more unsettling than the violence that preceded it and Austin suggests they call it a night. A few days later he tells Craig he no longer wishes to be friends. So begins the downward spiral that composes the rest of the movie.
In this latter stretch of Friendship, I started to wonder what DeYoung was aiming for beyond the comedic pleasures of Robinson’s performance. His script seems as interested in Craig’s psychology and masculinity as it is in the laughs it can mine from placing him in bizarre situations. The issue is that a lot of the resulting humor comes at the expense of articulating a full sense of Craig’s interiority.
On the surface, several things about Craig are apparent. He has all the confidence of a financially secure, middle-aged business school graduate, without any of the social habituation that a life of healthy friendship might have fostered. When a moment calls for sincerity, he deflects with raunchy humor; when it calls for patience or restraint, he explodes with rage; and when he doesn’t understand the emotional tenor of a conversation, he resorts to inane observations. To put it plainly, there is an art to the way he fucks up every interaction, always miscalibrating his responses a few degrees in the wrong direction no matter the context. He is, to put it bluntly, a loser. He is also desperate for acceptance, but never at the cost of changing himself or admitting wrongdoing on his part.
In Robinson’s performance these traits often manifest in hilarious ways, but the film’s genre-ambivalence (a trademark of A24 joints) frequently undercuts its comedic inclinations with reminders of Craig’s self-imposed alienation. Connor O’Malley’s appearance late in the film – the New Yorker christened “Bard of the Manosphere” – emphasizes the masculine flavor of that alienation. He plays a character who is as inept as Craig but whose immaturity manifests in a different way, namely full-throated opinions that punch holes through polite conversation. An offhand remark about the 70s economy. An assertion that pulling out of Afghanistan was a mistake. An accusation that Craig intended to leave his wife for dead in the sewer. These remarks are similar to those made by the incensed men O’Malley usually plays.
In his “Stand-up Solutions” special O’Malley takes the stage as Richard Eagleton, a flailing midwestern entrepreneur and conspiracy theory aficionado who has developed an AI program that generates “one hundred percent accurate comedy” by pulling data from its audience using “the power of 5G.” Over the course of Eagleton’s talk we learn that he loves his Toyota RAV4, practices a pseudoscientific diet and exercise regimen, and dreams of living in an all-brown house. Also: that he suffered public humiliation at a comedy show one year ago (the indignity that inspired him to launch his AI start-up in the first place). At one point in the special, he has an oddly sincere moment with a young male audience member. After sizing the man up, he asks how old he is. “Twenty-seven,” the man says. Eagleton responds, “Enjoy it. Because I’m gonna tell you… It gets weirder. Imagine Joe Rogan without the money.”
O’Malley’s comedy is packed with pointed one-liners and details like this, jokes that indicate his character’s emotional immaturity and ineptitude as well as some deeply suppressed despair. In the alt-comedy universe of disaffected middle-aged men, the psychology of Richard Eagleton feels very precisely calibrated. Craig Waterman on the other hand remains a bit of a cypher.
Perhaps it’s the way Craig’s alienation manifests. He is not brimming with the controversial opinions that mask the despair of O’Malley’s character. More so, he is like an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with deep human connection. After his breakup with Austin, Craig tries desperately to replace him via the other relationships in his life. All of this goes disastrously awry. He hosts a garage hangout with his subordinates that ends inhospitably; he coerces Steven into foraging wild mushrooms (spoiler: they wind up being poisonous); and he tricks Tami into an impromptu adventure through the city’s underground tunnels. During this forced outing, the two get separated and Tami goes missing. Two days later, after search and rescue teams have been deployed in the tunnels, Craig is notified of her safe recovery.
When he gets home, he finds her on the couch beside their son – covered in sewer grime and a space blanket. Instead of immediately apologizing and comforting her, Craig takes a seat in the armchair across from them and complains about how hot it is inside, as if making conversation with strangers in a hospital waiting room. This is the point where I started to lose track of Craig. His pathological avoidance raised new questions and reminded me of other story threads the movie had yet to make good on.
Friendship opens on Kate Mara’s monologue in a cancer support group meeting, but this context does little to inform the rest of the story. Initially, when Tami went missing, I expected we were going to learn that she was imaginary, that Craig had lost her to cancer a few years ago and had yet to process his grief. I supposed she was functioning as a metaphorical stand-in for that strain of masculinity in which heterosexual men adapt to sharing their deepest emotions with wives and girlfriends alone (see: “emotional gold diggers”). In such relationships, women come to play triple roles: romantic partner, therapist, and life coach. But DeYoung never accounts for their dynamic. The movie has no theory as to how Craig wound up (a) married to Kate Mara look-a-like Tami and (b) the guy who, during a cancer support group meeting, jokes that he is orgasming just fine after his wife laments that she has lost the ability to do so after chemo.
Robinson’s comedic talents are strong enough to pave over these gaps in the script. There are even times when the comedy aligns with Craig’s spiritual repression. His psychedelic subway experience is painfully funny and unexpected whilst simultaneously revealing how impoverished Craig’s inner life is. It says, even with the assistance of psychedelics, he is incapable of imagining anything more exotic than a fast casual dining experience. It also reveals a deep fear that he is missing out on a life of fulfilling relationships, given Austin (his one friend in years) appears as close to him in his dreams as a stranger assembling sandwiches.
In moments like this the film seems to have more in common with Ari Aster’s underrated horror comedy Beau is Afraid than it does with I Love You Man. Had Joaquin Phoenix played the lead here, one imagines the film would have had a completely different trajectory, that there would have been a greater demand for narrative coherence. What we get instead is a film that plays like a bunch of I Think You Should Leave outtakes reimagined and banged together with half-convincing plot maneuvers. The result is a somewhat hollow protagonist: ideas for a character that fall short of fully comprehensible.
At one point Tami implies that she believes Craig is a narcissist, like her mother’s ex-husband. Sometimes this seems like a viable explanation. Yet there are plenty of other suggestions that Craig is sincerely trying to fulfill his obligations as a husband, friend, and father. He is just emotionally incapable of doing so.
Whatever the underlying cause, something is surely broken in Craig. In rare moments, that brokenness comes to the surface as genuine sadness – like when he sees the orchid that reminds him of Tami and collapses to the ground in tears. But by the end of the film I felt adrift, in no-man’s land, not sure what to make of Craig beyond the obvious vehicle he provides for Robinson’s star power.
The irony seems to be that Robinson’s performance, while also the film’s greatest strength, prevents Friendship from achieving the high aims DeYoung’s script set for itself. At least A24, who is already banking on the film’s popular appeal with a retail line of hats and slacks inspired by it, can count on the rare feat Robinson’s casting virtually guarantees: an independent film that makes its budget back at the box office. Turns out meme-friendly faces also pave the way for box-office-friendly cinema.
I have little doubt that Craig will generate another onslaught of memes in the next month of expanded theatrical releases. After that, the film will make its way to streamers before getting sliced into clips and remade as short form video content. I can see Robinson’s head scaling down each step along the way: from the silver screen to the smart TV to the virtual group chat, where his befuddled expression is destined remain, immortalized alongside all the other memes we once called cinema too.