“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.

DeYoung pitches...