Except Craig, being a certain variety of grown American man, doesn’t have friends, per se. He has Tami, who is almost unbelievably nice to him given he’s sort of a putz: obsessed with avoiding Marvel spoilers, loyal to only one brand of clothing that he apparently sources from a restaurant called Ocean View Dining. His co-workers joke around with one another on their smoke breaks, which he watches from his office window, nose all but pressed against the glass. Then, one day, he meets the new neighbor, Austin Carmichael (Rudd), who turns out to be the coolest guy Craig could imagine. Austin has a mustache. He’s the local weatherman. He plays in a band. He buys antique weaponry. He knows just which rules to break to have a good time.
So Craig develops a kind of obsession with Austin, not exactly the creepy kind but not exactly uncreepy, either. Hanging out with Austin, Craig can see a different future for himself, one in which he is a rad, manly, sought-after leader who jams out on the drums and impresses everyone around him. If Craig hangs out with Austin, people will want to be his friend, too.
At first, it works. But you already know Craig is going to mess this up, in his own special equivalent of that sixth-grade nightmare, and “Friendship” ventures into increasingly surreal territory from there.
Cringe comedy requires a dose of plausibility, the unsettling sense that no matter how weird things get, it’s got the watcher’s basic number. Here that’s accomplished through sheer ordinariness. Craig is a profoundly predictable man, a guy with few ambitions or original thoughts. (On a drug trip, sold to him as profoundly revelatory of the meaning of life, he sees himself ordering a Subway sandwich.) He’s not bad at his job, and he hasn’t screwed up his life. He’s just, well, I don’t know, annoying.
In other words, we definitely know this guy. We’ve probably been trying hard, since middle school at least, not to be him. But Robinson’s performance, which sometimes feels dropped in from a parallel dimension that’s about 3 percent different from our own, injects Craig with a quality most similar to an erratically ticking time bomb. Not having developed an interior life, he’s all vibe and reaction: Shame or provocation might make him shrivel, or explode, or some unimaginable third thing.
