Friendship Director Andrew DeYoung on the ‘Primal’ Comedy of Male Loneliness

Friendship director Andrew DeYoung doesn't think it's hard for men to make friends. He thinks it's hard for men to keep them.

Friendship — DeYoung's feature debut as a writer-director — stars Tim Robinson as Craig, a lonely suburban dad who is married to the mysterious Tami (Kate Mara), but lonely. He becomes platonically smitten with his cool new neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd), a weatherman who embraces adventure. But Craig's efforts to impress and imitate Austin lead to a series of crises.

Friendship is one of the funniest movies we've seen, which is especially striking because DeYoung eschews a comic tone — he looked to Paul Thomas Anderson's grim The Master for aesthetic inspiration.

The film locks into greatness with the casting of the endlessly likable Rudd — who just seems like your cool neighbor — and Robinson, whose uncomfortably perceptive eye for social catastrophes fuels his brilliant Netflix series, I Think You Should Leave.

But Friendship also nails a moment when many men aren't sure how to be men, which is summarized in its provocative, preposterous tagline, "Men shouldn't have friends." At a loss for how to connect, some turn to the caustic theatrics of Andrew Tate-style influencers, while others turn introspective, looking for real ways to grow and improve.

DeYoung, 42, is good at making friends — he met Robinson at the wedding of Robinson's fellow Saturday Night Live alum, Aidy Bryant. But he says the real struggle for many men is to maintain friendships beyond the surface level.

"I think male relationships are hard to continue," he says. "And I really feel like, at least in my generation, we were really under-socialized. I know we're seeing in a big way now almost like a resurgence, an overcorrection in culture, of this type of masculinity that I think is ultimately destructive."

He continues: "I feel like, in general — and I see this in in a lot of my male relationships, even to this day — there's a certain inability to navigate depth and hard moments that are inevitable in a relationship. I see a lot of my friends struggling with it, failing, and trying to get better at it.

"The current kind of masculine wave speaks to an unmet need men are desiring, but they're confused about getting that need met."

You can listen to our full talk with Andrew DeYoung on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts or right here:

Andrew DeYoung on Friendship and Confronting Our Inner Craig

DeYoung is upfront about the fact that he doesn't know what men should do. He just recognizes the dark comedy in the struggle to be a modern man.

"I'm not here to diagnose. I'm simply here to to point out," he says. "And hopefully people get some joy out of acknowledging how kind of difficult and how hard it is, trying to connect with someone in any way, and kind of falling short, and not knowing how to really process one's feelings.

"There's plenty of other resources out there that can invite you into a deeper relationship with yourself that then hopefully opens you up to a greater relationship with others. But what I'm trying to do is simply make a movie that's cathartic, because we're all, I think, deeply kind of feeling separate right now."

DeYoung knows the suburban setting of Friendship well, even though the suburb in the film is snowier than Fresno, California, where he grew up. He studied screenwriting at Cal State State Northridge, and, after graduating in 2005, made short films and became a top TV comedy director on shows including Pen15, AP Bio, I Love That for You, Our Flag Means Death, and Shrill, which starred Bryant.

He thinks masculine bonding is improving with younger generations, "to a certain degree." (See also: the recent TikTok trend of young men calling their friends to say goodnight.) In the meantime, Friendship offers a pretty good primer for aspiring friends on how not to conduct themselves.

"Recognizing ourselves in Craig, the laughs come from watching a guy who doesn't know how to stop himself in ways that we do — most of us, at least. He's getting to do the things that we really deep down, in a primal way, would like to do. But we stop ourselves, because we know the consequences."

DeYoung likes to follow the primal intincts — the ones that feel like they'll resonate forever. When asked what kind of validation he seeks for a script before he decides to invest the years it takes to turn it into a film, he replies: "None. If I feel it, I feel it. That's it."

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He wrote Friendship in 2020, and made some tweaks along the way with the casting of Robinson and Rudd, especially to give Rudd's Austin more vulnerability. Throughout the process, he always believed in the basic ideas of the film.

"I mean, it's primal stuff, what's in the movie. Any jokes that I wrote in 2020 that that didn't feel like they had staying power, we just cut," he says. "But deep down, the premise of it is primal stuff — connection is like food, shelter, that kind of stuff."

Friendship is now in theaters, from A24.

Main image: Tim Robinson in Friendship. A24.