I Love You, I LOVE YOU, MAN

Why FRIENDSHIP can't top this brom-com

Friendship, 2025. © A24

A24’s marketing for Friendship (now playing in select theaters) has not shied away from its closest comparison in the “bromantic” comedy space, especially since it also features Paul Rudd: 2009’s I Love You, Man (available on Paramount+). I figured I could lean into it, too, in my review for Slant Magazine:

“There’s no rules for male friendship!” exclaims Paul Rudd’s Peter Klaven in John Hamburg’s 2009 film I Love You, Man as he agonizes over the intricacies of platonic etiquette. Over a decade and a half later, the actor returns to find humor and insight across the same thematic terrain in writer-director Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship. This time, however, his character is the object of anxious affection rather than its originator.

Society, too, has shifted since 2009. Today, the epidemic of male loneliness is taken seriously as an “issue” to debate rather than merely a topic of discussion, though it’s also prone to being skewered by meme culture. Friendship lands somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, offering little in the way of answers or cures yet providing plenty of gut-busting laughs. While not necessarily a response to the times, it’s undeniably a product of them.

You might not be able to tell from the excerpt, but I have a clear favorite of the two films: I Love You, Man. I’ve been banging the drum for this since seeing it in theaters with my best guy friend in high school, and my appreciation has only deepened the more I’ve rewatched it. Jon Hamburg’s send-up of genre tropes and male manners in the early millennium is more than mere satirization. It’s a bold reimagining of the comedy of remarriage, a popular strain of romantic comedies in the early studio screwball era, for a contemporary audience.

I Love You, Man, 2009. © Paramount

I read the definitive text on this subgenre, Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, so you don’t have to. (It’s simultaneously dry in its academic approach yet so embellished with flowery language that it becomes like hacking through vines to get to his point.) I’ll help you interpret I Love You, Man through that prism so you can understand and appreciate just how smart Hamburg’s film is. The comedy goes well beyond simply swapping gender and sexuality into a relationship arc as the concept might initially present.