Over the course of three seasons, I Think You Should Leave has cemented Tim Robinson as a genuinely iconic comedic performer. With episodes under 20 minutes packed with sketches lending themselves to repeated viewing and intense memeability, Robinson’s distinct comedic and literal voices have pervaded culture. It took six years after being fired from Saturday Night Live for Robinson to get such a showcase, and with the disappearance of the studio comedy, it’s taken until now for him to lead a film.
Written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, a frequent collaborator of Kate Berlant and John Early making his feature debut, Friendship is clearly Robinson’s film despite appearing across a much more established star in Paul Rudd. When Austin (Rudd) moves in down the street from Craig (Robinson), they briefly hit it off before Craig alienates Austin by being untenably annoying. Though Robinson doesn’t have a screenplay credit, the film’s rhythms are defined by his absurd voice and total disconnect from reality. Though his characters on his show and in this film all bear different names, it’s not dissimilar to Paul Reubens portraying Pee-Wee Herman in both his own projects and ones initiated by others.
Also much like Pee-Wee, it seems a bit improbable that such a one-note persona could sustain an entire feature. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure pulls off the trick by combining Herman’s amiability with the visual invention of early-career Tim Burton. DeYoung’s direction exceeds mere competency, but it isn’t going to blow anyone away, and Robinson’s energy is on the opposite end of the likability scale. There’s also nothing to escalate; the scenarios may become more intense, but Robinson is by design always operating at 100%, and so after a point nothing Craig does comes as a surprise.
Where Robinson and DeYoung manage to mine some dynamism, then, is by playing with status. Though Robinson frequently plays detestable cucks, and that’s generally what Craig is, he’s also able to propel himself to a higher status by sheer force of will (think of his character as a Season 3 sketch with Beck Bennett who is the leader of a cult like “friend group”). Rudd’s charisma generally lends itself to the opposite, and as a local weatherman he is indeed vastly more popular than Craig, but cracks in that persona also allow his and Robinson’s dynamic to shuffle back and forth to some extent. Kate Mara plays Craig’s wife Tami and gets about as much screentime as Rudd, and though she gets to deadpan a few strong laugh lines, the role ultimately hews too closely to the archetypal thankless wife: no amount of agency within the confines of the film could ever explain why Tami would fall for Craig, and it’s tougher to watch such a relationship play out over 90 minutes than four.
That being said, what matters most is that the film is funny. Robinson is cilantro as a performer, though no one who already can’t stand him is going to be won over by Friendship; everyone else is likely to get what they want out of it. The screenplay has plenty of actual jokes to go with Robinson’s performance, including one subversion of an exhausted trope that approaches actual genius. Even in a screening for press and industry at TIFF, several scenes received laughs well beyond their conclusion, and at other points spontaneous giggles became outright contagious. Conner O’Malley, a comedian with an even more intense if also more niche cult than Robinson, makes a characteristically unhinged cameo, and Carmen Christopher, another ITYSL performer, gets a memorable moment during the film’s climax. Which all goes to say, Friendship may not be the mainstream comedy classic this decade lacks, but Rudd’s presence at least provides a bridge for a new generation of comedic talent to a previous era. Hopefully the currently undistributed film is a sign of things to come rather than an outlier destined to languish on some streaming service.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 4.
