A Real Pain review – Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin lead pat buddy dramedy

Over a nearly two-decade acting career, Jesse Eisenberg has established an energy so distinct you could describe the characters and the movies around them by his name – wordy, wry, brimming with nerves and discomfort. He can deliver a scathing deadpan, as in The Social Network, or a rapid-fire spit of anxieties, most recently in Fleishman Is in Trouble. He’s a natural fit for a certain type of small-stakes, character-driven indie dramedy, as was his first feature as a writer-director, last year’s When You Finish Saving the World, about fractured, lonely, sardonic family of three; its humorous, wincing journey of social awkwardness, as the New Yorker bluntly put it, “very Jesse Eisenberg”.

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For better or for worse, his second feature, A Real Pain, is even more Jesse Eisenberg – in part because he plays a talky and tightly wound character – but with a mistier eye and sweeter heart than its forbearer. (The film counts Emma Stone and her husband, SNL writer Dave McCary, as producers.) Still, it’s a dramedy of discontents: we meet Eisenberg’s David Kaplan, a New Yorker who sells digital ads for a living, making a series of anxious phone calls to cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin), an impishly charming idler, in his trademark nervous patter. They’re bound for Poland to visit the homeland of their grandmother, owing to her final wishes and, in their own way, nagging guilt over the weight of historical trauma. Their grandma Dory was one of the lucky ones, a Polish Jew who escaped the Holocaust and built a new life.

A Real Pain is, on one level, a philosophical inquiry into how to contextualize, scale or feel the universal, galling experience of human pain; how to weigh one’s individual problems in the face of great tragedy (like, say, David’s medicated OCD, compared to the Holocaust); what to do with a legacy of suffering and survival. And it is more straightforwardly a combustion of performance styles: Culkin and Eisenberg play extremely to their types. Both actors have made careers out of playing characters who seem like they want to crawl out of their skin, just running at different temperatures – Eisenberg is cold, clammy, cutting; Culkin, hot-blooded, twitchy and chaotic. Like Roman Roy, Culkin’s character on Succession, Benji is a foul-mouthed man-child with little impulse control or filter. Unlike him, he is actually interested in other people and has better class politics (“money is like fucking heroin for boring people”, he says in one of many outbursts nearly causing David an aneurysm).

Benji is clearly in emotional pain, with a vague backstory of doing nothing much for years until recent turmoil. (He was closer to their grandmother, a “bygone realist” I wish I knew more about.) Though Culkin plays him with scene-stealing, live-wire intensity, he remains a Movie Character, more Peter Pan foil than adult. He can be wearisome, yet easily endears himself to the Kaplans’ fellow group tourists in Poland, each drawn by a personal connection to Jewishness or trauma. Flinty LA divorcee Marcia’s (Jennifer Grey) grandparents also fled the Holocaust; older couple Mark (Daniel Oreskes) and Diane (Liza Sadovy) have Polish Jewish ancestry; Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan) escaped the Rwandan genocide and converted to Judaism in Canada. Will Sharpe demonstrates sharp comedic timing – he got the biggest laugh out of a lightly funny movie – and brings palpable vulnerability to James, the Oxford-credentialed, non-Jewish tour guide just trying to do his best at a strange job.

Filmed on location in Poland, including at the Majdanek concentration camp, A Real Pain has an alluring, unforced sense of place; Eisenberg and cinematographer Michal Dymek capture Warsaw, Lublin and the Polish countryside with a curious eye, and not always glamorously. Returning to such a haunted, hallowed place also means plenty of graffiti, Communist brutalism, nondescript hotel rooms and trains.

But the rich cityscapes and Eisenberg’s keen visual instinct for emotional claustrophobia fade behind the intensity of its movie rhythm. David needs to get out of his own head and Benji craves something all-caps REAL; cue symbolic moment, thematic discussion, a character-revealing response undercut by something quirky, bathetic or humbling, repeat. A Real Pain is occasionally insightful on the subject of suffering, sometimes funny, a bit endearing, a little pretentious, often dry. In other words, very of a type.

• A Real Pain is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution