Tribeca 2024: Sacramento and Adult Best Friends Navigate the Perils of (Still) Growing Up

Adult Best Friends could be an alternate title for about a dozen different comedies released in the nearly 20 years since Judd Apatow normalized the legal-adult-coming-of-age narrative in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. The movie actually titled Adult Best Friends more closely resembles the female side of this story as seen in Bridesmaids, Frances Ha, Life Partners and Rough Night, where once-close women must come to terms with the way that tastes, goals and personal lives develop at different rates – here given some extra verisimilitude by the implication that Katie Corwin (who co-stars and writes) and Delaney Buffett (who co-stars, writes and directs) may be working out some of their own issues, given that they’ve named their characters after themselves in the screenplay they wrote together.
It’s Katie (Corwin) who takes the Maya Rudolph-in-Bridesmaids role of inching toward respectability, getting engaged to her affable boyfriend John (Mason Gooding) – who her bestie Delaney (Buffett) dislikes, seemingly in large part because he is, in fact, her affable boyfriend. After a contentious night out and in – specifically, Delaney insists on going out while Katie would rather just stay in and watch a movie – Katie hesitates to tell Delaney about her engagement without laying the proper groundwork. For a planner like Katie, this means a weekend beach getaway (to where is unclear; the movie’s setting is intentionally vague for reasons that themselves seem even vaguer), just the girls. She’ll break the news there, while reveling in their rekindled closeness.
Of course, Katie and Delaney’s return to the beach town they both enjoyed as kids doesn’t go as planned, featuring low-key mishap encounters with a fussy Airbnb host, a motley crew of bachelor-partying bros, and alcohol. Some of this is funny, like the weird mix of bros, including a perpetually irritated crypto enthusiast. Some of it has the stiffness of big comedy pitches, like the Airbnb guy who gets an end-credits curtain call like he’s everyone’s favorite new scene-stealer. And some of it stings, like the high school friend who haphazardly pulls Katie and Delaney into an impromptu afternoon meal. Too much relies on Wow, This Guy Sucks humor.
The emotional core is supposed to be Delaney and Katie visibly drifting apart, and wondering if the concept of best friends even makes sense in adulthood. Buffett (the daughter of recently departed singer Jimmy Buffett) and Corwin convey this with grounded, unaffected performances, finding the reflexive moments of closeness that fuel so many hours of finding each other irritating. But that precise lack of shtickiness to their acting also indicates why Adult Best Friends never truly rises above a simmer. In movies like these, heartfelt relatability and comic setpieces (or even just consistently funny dialogue) form their own odd-couple symbiosis; Buffett’s movie feels more like a super-lo-fi Bridesmaids without enough of the aesthetic tradeoff that should come from ditching that movie’s generic glossiness. It’s rough going, in other words, not least because we’ve seen Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig, Greta Gerwig and Ilana Glazer all deal with this problem on screen, some as recently as a few weeks ago.
So does that mean it’s time for the boys to take another crack at this material? Of course, they do this all the time. But it’s striking how often this movie’s dude equivalents either focus near-exclusively on affirming or gaining friendship, rather than the stresses of growing apart; or emphasize an extended adolescence where growing up ultimately involves reaching certain personal markers, rather than real internal turmoil. The exception that proves the rule is Superbad, which is built around the emotional peril of a potentially drifting friendship – and has the more traditional coming-of-age location at the end of high school, rather than even-messier adulthood.