115 min | R | September 30, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Bobby Lieber is a neurotic podcast host building the first national LGBTQ+ history museum. He falls for Aaron, an emotionally locked estate lawyer who would rather lift than talk. The first big-studio gay rom-com turns out to be a regular rom-com, and that is exactly the flex.
Bobby Lieber hosts a popular podcast about queer history and chairs the committee building the first national LGBTQ+ history museum. He is forty, proudly single, and certain that romance is a straight-people delusion he outgrew years ago. Then he meets Aaron Shepard at a crowded club. Aaron is an estate lawyer who lifts weights, guards his feelings, and would rather text than talk. The film is about two guarded men learning that the love they were told not to expect might actually be available. It is also the rare studio comedy that treats a gay relationship as worthy of the full rom-com machinery.
Billy Eichner plays Bobby as a man who weaponizes language. He talks fast and loud because silence might let someone close enough to hurt him. The performance turns the actor’s familiar abrasive energy into something with a wound underneath it. Luke Macfarlane plays Aaron as the opposite instrument, giving him long pauses and a flat affect that slowly cracks. The chemistry works because the two men actually listen to each other across that gap. Guy Branum sharpens every scene as Bobby’s friend Henry, and the museum board, including TS Madison as Angela and Dot-Marie Jones as Cherry, supplies a steady run of deadpan.
Nicholas Stoller directs from a script he writes with Eichner, and the two build the film inside the conventional grammar of the genre on purpose. The lighting stays warm, the New York establishing shots stay glossy, and the meet-cute and the montage arrive on schedule. Stoller stages the comedy so the editing never clips Eichner’s verbal riffs, letting the monologues run to their full ridiculous length. The polish is the argument. The film insists these two men deserve the same studio treatment Hollywood has spent a century lavishing on straight couples.
The movie is funny and fast and occasionally too aware of its own importance. It stops now and then to deliver a speech about representation when the romance was making the same point more gracefully. The leads carry it past those stretches. Eichner and Macfarlane build a relationship specific enough that the politics take care of themselves. Bros works best when it forgets it is a milestone and remembers it is a comedy about two difficult people trying to let each other in.