Welcome and happy summer 2025! It’s the start of outdoor barbecue season, peak wedding season, and apparently a season when everyone talks about adult friendships, in all their messy glory. Today, my take on a new comedy about a lame man. Plus: I tried the new bro-tein bar that I keep hearing so much about.
Can Men Make Friends in 2025?
A friend of mine reached out, disappointed, after I lashed out at Anthony Bourdain fanboys in last week’s column. “You went too far today,” he texted. “There are no new lands to explore, the drones fight the wars, and the AI does the work. Just let us have street meat.”
By “us” he means: men. And the text was all the encouragement I needed to watch a new movie about them, and their lostness. It’s called Friendship. It came out late last week, and it’s about the lengths one man will go to bask inside the warm glow of a group of buds. A pitch-black comedy, it focuses on a man named Craig, played by Tim Robinson, who is very lame. No one respects him at work—his job is to make apps more addictive for a dead-ending company called “Universal Digital Innovations”—and both his wife and son are unimpressed by him, though wife and son have a loving, quasi-sexual relationship with each other. Craig’s life isn’t bad, it’s just banal. Nothing ever happens. Until, that is, he meets his new neighbor, Austin Carmichael.