In writer-director Paul Schrader’s Grand Guignol of white guy shame, 1979’s Hardcore, George C. Scott is Jake VanDorn, a middle-aged small business owner from Grand Rapids, Michigan who must travel to California to rescue his teenage daughter from the porn industry. A boring and arguably pathetic man, he leaves the Midwest for the West Coast, propelled by desperation into a nightmare he could have never anticipated. 

Jake’s mind-bending culture shock is maybe best encapsulated in one scene, early in the film, when the deeply religious man is shown an X-rated film starring his daughter. Immediately, Jake’s face becomes a throbbing knot, his torment accentuated by the projector’s flickering light. He claws at his skull, hoping to relieve the pain of his mind being torn asunder, unable to grasp how little control he has over the bleak, unforgiving vastness of the cosmos. “Turn it off!” he hollers, over and over—this is the helpless plea of an Extremely Michigan Man rendered impotent by existence. It’s very funny.

Tim Robinson looks a lot like Scott in Hardcore. A Detroit native who made his way through Second City Chicago before joining the cast of Saturday Night Live, Robinson has based much of his career around embodying Midwestern-coded nobodies constantly begging the universe to turn off. And, as the co-creator of Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave, he seems to understand the existential quandary of Extremely Michigan Men more than most.

Essentially, every character Robinson portrays is some varietal of that guy—cocooned by the Midwest his whole life but perpetually aggrieved at that safety, given to escalating every situation he encounters, usually by yelling, because there is nothing else he can do to express himself in the endless cavalcade of compromises that comprises basic human interaction. 

See: Friendship, A24’s latest esteemed comedy, written and directed by Andrew deYoung and starring Robinson as Craig: a vaguely Midwestern, emotionally scraped-out dope of a husband who doesn’t really do much of anything or have hobbies. What he does have is a teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer) who’s old enough to see the outline of the better dad Craig could be, but too old to kiss his mom (Kate Mara) on the mouth, an act Craig comments on immediately after witnessing it (“You guys kiss on the mouth?”), as if he’s a stranger in his own house.

This is how deYoung’s script and Robinson’s comedy tend to operate, with jokes explaining themselves via Robinson’s exasperated delivery and effortless knack for contorting his body into hostile architecture. Craig does talk to himself often throughout Friendship, complaining in half-syllables or sounding out unfinished thoughts, never allowing silence to persist in otherwise exceptionally quiet scenes. Whispered asides almost always erupt into cacophony.

Craig rarely engages meaningfully with the people in his lives, so when he starts hanging out with his cool new neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd)—a local TV news weatherman who casually rolls his own cigarettes and moonlights in a punk band—Craig officially gives himself a reason to sign off completely on ignoring his wife (who’s only been cancer-free for a year), son, and most other modern exigencies, like having a phone to stay in contact with his family or keeping a job to help them have food to eat.

Of course, everything in Craig’s life takes a slight, and then sharp, turn for the demented. Drug-toads are licked and gold-plated guns brandished. Meanwhile cinematographer Andy Rydzewski shoots the dissolution of Craig and Austin’s relationship with the muted sheen of a thriller, as if deYoung and Robinson are parodying the A24 prestige offerings amongst which they currently find their dumb comedy about an annoying guy who won’t stop raging against the dying of the light. Subterranean scenes even begin to resemble the “elevated horror” for which the studio is so well known, menace hunched in the corners of poorly lit suburban infrastructure.

Modern life is a cage, masculinity is in crisis, Friendship is very much like I Think You Should Leave, etc. Robinson never really shuts up, Craig’s chatter the mournful call of the emasculated man flailing against an unresponsive universe. So the degree to which you’ll be on board for 100 minutes of Robinson’s incessant powerless hollering—punctuated by a lovely a capella rendition of Ghost Town DJ’s’ “My Boo” and composer Keegan DeWitt’s neon-noir-streaked score—might be directly proportionate to how much you feel like the universe is indifferent to you too.

While Mara and Rudd balance Craig’s anarchic fits with subtler character depth, complicating otherwise obvious themes around what it means to be a statistically average white guy whose life has no stakes, Friendship is still in thrall to Tim Robinson. His face and his voice are inescapable.

Your mileage may vary, but there’s no denying that pathetic men make for good comedy. If we’re currently enjoying a golden age of pathetic men, why beg it to stop?

Friendship opens at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st; Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy on Thurs, May 15 and in wide release on Fri May 23.