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.
Superbad’s Michael Cera reluctantly confronts his own frayed adult barely-friendship in Sacramento, which premiered alongside Adult Best Friends at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Unlike a lot of Apatow-style heroes (and heroines), Glenn (Cera) isn’t resisting the trappings of adulthood; he lives with his wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart), who will soon give birth to their first child. When his de facto best friend Ricky (Michael Angarano) shows up outside his window, Glenn’s first instinct is to hide from him, not wanting to deal with his pal’s flaky, erratic regressions to teenage-style antics. But Ricky has more adult concerns, too, even if he processes them through a mixture of therapy-speak and being kind of a moron. Reeling from the death of his father, he cajoles Glenn into a trip from Los Angeles up to Sacramento, where he supposedly needs to scatter his dad’s ashes. But Ricky’s mission may actually involve a figure from his past, played by Maya Erskine (the real-life spouse of writer-director-star Angarano).
Funny as he’s always been, Cera never necessarily seemed like the strongest candidate to translate his comic persona – halting, nervous, soft-spoken but sometimes passive-aggressive – into full-blown adulthood, and some would argue that in slight indies like this, he hasn’t. Yet he’s become startlingly adept at playing a particular kind of sincere fussbudget who strains to play at his way through would-be domesticity, even as he seems to actively desire it. (Seriously: He was doing this at last year’s Tribeca, too.) Early in the movie, Glenn rattles a crib he’s just assembled until it breaks – not out of dread over his impending fatherhood, but out of neurotic fear that he won’t be able to make a safe world for his baby. The character’s delicate panicking can be frustrating, even a burden – Rosie says as much, with refreshing candor – so it’s all the more impressive that Cera still somehow makes him genuinely comic.
It’s hard not to wonder if Cera isn’t improvising his way through Sacramento, at least partially, both because his lines sound so specifically his own, and because Angarano seems so adrift by comparison. That’s partially by design; his Ricky is so feckless he doesn’t always seem to understand when he’s bullshitting people, as if waiting for someone to give him perfectly calibrated, easy-to-follow instructions. Angarano brings that quality to life without ever deepening it into something more profound; his insistent performance winds up feeling nearly as thin as Ricky’s does. Stewart and Erskine, on the other hand, are doing work so lived-in, so much more shaded than the nagging wife/girlfriend figures that typically orbit male immaturity narratives, that it’s hard not to wish the movie were about them instead. Stewart manages to generate friction despite behaving entirely counterintuitively in the role of wife who stays home: She encourages Glenn to go on this impromptu trip, addresses her husband’s weaknesses directly and doesn’t issue a single ultimatum even when she probably ought to. Erskine, meanwhile, twines together desperation and independence to create a strong and instantly understandable impression without a lot of screen time.
Given the material, Sacramento should be pricklier and less likable than Adult Best Friends. That it instead winds up warmer and funnier seems attributable largely to the cast – and its surprisingly nuanced take on male parental anxiety, in a culture that tends to make young fatherhood more symbolic than practical. If the friendship material winds up coming in a distant second or third, well, that’s part of growing up, isn’t it?
Adult Best Friends
Director: Delaney Buffett
Writer: Katie Corwin, Delaney Buffett
Starring: Delaney Buffett, Katie Corwin, Mason Gooding
Release Date: June 8, 2024 (Tribeca)
Sacramento
Director: Michael Angarano
Writer: Chris Smith, Michael Angarano
Starring: Michael Angarano, Michael Cera, Kristen Stewart, Maya Erskine
Release Date: June 8, 2024 (Tribeca)
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including GQ, Decider, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.
