Written and directed by Andrew DeYoung and also featuring Kate Mara and Jack Dylan Grazer, the film is about two neighbors whose friendship takes an awkward turn.

Having successfully built a devoted following as a leading purveyor of cringe comedy with his hit Netflix sketch series, I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson, the show’s rubber-faced star/co-creator ups his game with the innocently titled Friendship, a gleefully discomfiting portrait of male bonding that delivers some of the year’s biggest laughs.

Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to land the always game Rudd as the object of one’s obsession. Rudd is himself no stranger to bromantic comedies, having starred in 2009’s I Love You, Man, which plays like innocuous fluff in comparison to DeYoung and Robinson’s no-holds-barred approach to the subject. Receiving its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Midnight Madness selection should have no problem bonding with a niche distributor.

But his reasonably unremarkable life is upended when a misdelivered package brings him to the home of new neighbor Austin Carmichael (Rudd), a rather shaggy TV weatherman with a porn mustache and a soft spot for Craig’s oddball personality. In short order, Austin brings Craig into his social orbit, inviting him to see his rock band perform, going mushroom foraging and taking him on a subterranean trek through an abandoned aqueduct beneath City Hall.

When the budding relationship is stopped in its tracks by Craig’s troublingly obsessive behavior, Austin announces, “I don’t wish to accept this friendship at the moment.” But he soon finds out it’s not so easy to put the cork back into the bottle, inevitably setting the stage for an unpleasant showdown.

Prior to his boundary-nudging eponymous Netflix series, Robinson, sort of like Steve Carrell, Gene Wilder and Chris Farley all rolled into one, cut his satirical teeth as a writer and performer for several seasons on Saturday Night Live (2012-2016), giving him a solid basis in character-building. He knows exactly how far to take sad sack Craig to the edge of weirdness before reeling him in just in time to cling on to viewer good will.

Coaxing the best from his cast, writer-director DeYoung opts for a pace that favors the languid over the frantic. And while that’s a good fit for the characters, the film doesn’t serve much of a plot; at times, a more traditional, cranked-up approach would have been preferable, especially in the last act.

Nevertheless, the joint big-screen arrival of the Robinson/DeYoung duo ushers in a future for both that is anything but sketchy.