Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Real Pain’ on VOD, a Beautifully Offbeat Buddy-Dramedy Starring Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg

A Real Pain (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is the highlight of a strange year for Jesse Eisenberg: He writes, directs and stars in this prickly comedy-drama that’s almost certain to score co-star Kieran Culkin an Oscar nomination – and reasonable consideration for best picture and screenplay. Beyond that, Eisenberg played a grunting-and-pooping bigfoot in Sasquatch Sunset (no, really) and saw his directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World finally earn a modest audience on Netflix. The hit-and-mostly-miss satire of the latter movie is a clear stepping stone to greater things, evidenced by A Real Pain, which finds him honing his screenwriting voice, and turning up in the conversation about the year’s best films.

A REAL PAIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: This guy sits in an airport waiting lounge looking like he rushed out of the house so he wouldn’t miss his flight. His hair is disheveled and his clothes are probably the same ones he slept in last night. We soon learn that this is how he always looks, although his face may not always be so sadly contemplative – or maybe it is. This is Benji Kaplan (Culkin), and the title of the film appears in a medium shot next to his face: A Real Pain. Please consider the dual nature of that phrase before we cut to David Kaplan (Eisenberg) anxiously leaving Benji voicemail updates: he’s on his way to the airport, he’s in a car, traffic’s bad, now traffic isn’t so bad, he’s almost there. And then he’s there, printing out his boarding pass as Benji sneaks up behind him. “What’s up cuz!”, Benji bellows, and it soon becomes clear that these two guys exist on opposite ends of a neurotic spectrum, David wound tight and reserved, Benji an overbearing live wire.

David and Benji were close growing up, but as they became adults, they drifted apart. It happens. David lives a busy life with a wife and kid and steady job selling internet banner ads, and Benji lives a staid life in his mother’s basement and takes passive-aggressive jabs at people who make the world worse by filling it with internet banner ads. Benji doesn’t mince words, and David minces all of the words, every last one of them. But they’re excited to be spending some time together. Their grandmother passed away – Benji was very close to her – and left them a little money they’re using to travel to her native Poland for a Holocaust tour, wrapping with a visit to the house where she grew up. She survived the extermination camps thanks to, in David’s words, a million little miracles. The cousins not only will honor her memory on this trip, but also reestablish their relationship.

They’re part of a six-person tourist group including retired couple Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes), new divorcee Marcia (Jennifer Grey), Rwandan immigrant and Jewish convert Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), and their tour guide is James (Will Sharpe). The group breaks the ice with self-introductions, and the David-Benji dynamic become immediately prevalent: Benji is a bit loud and boorish and constantly throwing around f-words, and being funny and edgy and so very much his heart-on-his-sleeve self, while David cringes and feels the need to apologize for his cousin. But as the tour group eyeballs landmarks and listens to James’ knowledgeable spiels, it becomes increasingly obvious that Benji’s “embarrassing” behavior isn’t necessarily that – he’s challenging others’ sensibilities and connecting with them, whether inspiring them to act silly and have a little fun, or prompting them to think about, and just feel, this experience more. Benji makes everyone uncomfortable with a rant about how they’re all comfortable in hotels and first-class trains on their tourist jaunt, in direct contrast to the pain and horror of the history they’re exploring. “We’re on a f—ing Holocaust tour,” he spits. “If now isn’t the time and place to grieve, I don’t know what to tell you.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Eisenberg culls influence from Woody Allen’s neurotic-New Yorker films (none better than Manhattan or Annie Hall, of course), and odd-couple buddy road-trip comedies ranging from Rain Man to, I dunno, Harold and Kumar?

Performance Worth Watching: Culkin truly is a lightning rod in this film, and we cringe at Benji’s behavior at the same time feeling deep empathy for him. And let’s not overlook Eisenberg’s work in front of the camera, functioning as Culkin’s perfect foil, and delivering a powerhouse speech at the end of the second act that’ll knock you flat.

Memorable Dialogue: At the hotel in Poland, Benji picks up a package at the front desk – marijuana he had shipped overseas. David had been on edge, believing Benji was smuggling it over international borders.

David: Didn’t you see how nervous I was?

Benji: I did – I thought that was just you.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Eisenberg works within the confines of a familiar narrative structure – the road-trip buddy dramedy – but deepens it where so many others of its ilk go broad. As a director, he enhances and explores ideas about the growth and progress of the individual and society by cutting in modestly picturesque travelogue shots; one sequences cycles through various locales while the tour guide narrates how these fairly nondescript places, not at all the stuff of postcards, used to be bookshops and bakeries. Couple that with a Benji lament about how life goes on, persistently and unapologetically, despite so much suffering in the world, and you have an adroit contemplation of existence itself.

The quasi-travelogue sequence functions as a symbolic parallel for Benji and David’s relationship. They’ve changed since they were tight-knit teenage friends, trying to stay awake all night wandering New York City; now, David is neurotic but functional, and Benji is deeply depressed, and the world keeps spinning around them, as if fueled by pain – the pain of the individual and the pain of the collective. Pain is the common thread throughout the dense tapestry of the human condition. The Holocaust occurred, their grandmother survived it against the odds, and here they are, contemplating why they’re alive. At least Benji is, anyway, at first – he seems perilously in touch with the impossible contradictions of life, and one can’t help but wonder if that contributes to his seemingly unquenchable despair.

Not that Benji is a downer. Not at all – Culkin is a wrecking ball battering your heart, painfully funny, annoying, smart and insightful, a bolt of raw energy preventing the characters around him, and the film itself, from falling into any easy, comfortable rhythms. Meanwhile, Eisenberg smartly sidesteps the temptation to render David as a simple cypher for the audience; a significant portion of A Real Pain’s emotional poignancy keys on the filmmaker’s willingness to explore the psychological curlicues of his characters’ distinct dynamic. You might be tempted to armchair-psychoanalyze Benji and, eventually, as his own peccadilloes leak out, David. But it might be wise to resist simple definitions of these two men and their place in the world. Nobody likes to be pigeonholed as happy or sad or vivacious or reserved when the combinations and variations of such emotions are so richly complex, and so beautifully and tragically human.

Our Call: A Real Pain is a fascinating and bittersweet character study. And yes, it’s one of 2024’s best films. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.