Joshy (2016) review

Dir. Jeff Baena

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

Remembering Jeff Baena

 1977 – 2025

Jeff Baena’s Joshy is a strong, quietly powerful look at the way many millennials choose to handle calamity and tragedy in their lives, and that’s largely by way of suppression of feelings, most commonly through humor and childish antics. It’s a way to mask rawer, more unwanted feelings, and while the gang of overgrown children in Joshy should be mourning the loss of their friend’s fiancée’s suicide, they are instead still trying to piece together the remnants of their fabled bachelor party weekend.

The titular character is played by Thomas Middleditch, the very likable leading man on Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, in addition to the eccentric and nervous secondary character in this year’s hilarious film The Bronze, who’s fiancée winds up committing suicide on his birthday very shortly before the wedding. Joshy is obviously sad, and so are his friends, but they also think that cancelling their bachelor party would be a bad idea for everyone. They decide to take the weekend to go up to the woods, how countless mumblecore films so often begin, and have the party they were supposed to, sort of pretending as if nothing catastrophic and life-altering has happened to their best friend.

The crew is made up of the sweet and simple Ari (Adam Pally), who winds up meeting the cute and perky Jodi (Jenny Slate), in addition to the awkward Adam (Alex Ross Perry), the loud and wild Greg (Brett Gelman), and the bossy Eric (Nick Kroll), who is the ringleader of desperately trying to make everyone forget why they’ve gathered in the first place. At the center of it all is Joshy, who tries his hardest to look past tragedy and have a good time. To his credit, he’s successful a lot of the time, not even alluding to the idea that he is hurting inside. However, brief glimpses of his facial expressions and reactions show a deeper, more pained sense of loneliness than even he wants to admit.

The first night has the group bar-hopping and going out for a fun night, while the second is more bent on staying in, talking with the ladies they met the night before, smoking weed, and hanging out, something that greatly upsets Eric, who is always looking for the next big spectacle. Adam, on the other hand, played by the consistently hilarious and reliable Alex Ross Perry, prefers to simply keep to himself, especially after his girlfriend of ten years dumps him in the middle of the trip. He’d rather spend his getaway talking to the hot-tub repairman (Jake Johnson) about how he never liked hot-tubs and views them as a collection of emitting filth.

Some semblance of order and reason is briefly restored when Aaron and his wife Anita (Joe Swanberg and his wife Kris) show up with their young son (Jude Swanberg, Joe’s real-life son) and angrily remind everyone why they are here when they see all the beer bottles and marijuana paraphernalia scattered around the home. Leave it to Swanberg, one of my favorite directors working today, who has made several films about similar topics, to be the force of the film that gets everything back on track and really helps it regain its focus and show what it’s really about.

Joshy has one very emotional moment throughout its eighty-nine minute runtime, and it comes after Joshy’s fiancee’s parents come visit the home. When that scene comes, the whole time you realize you’ve basically been watching a series of twentysomethings stall and beat around the obvious, elephant-sized bush in the room and see how that kind of emotionally dodging, while unhealthy, is so common. And even when the most emotionally climactic scene takes place, the following scene has all but forgotten it, despite it having the potential to prompt an incredible amount of conversation amongst friends.

We are a generation that speaks in references to other things in the world of pop culture and music to explain how we feel, repress our emotions until we can’t help but cry, and overwork ourselves until we can barely move. Joshy shows all that and more, and fittingly, doesn’t dwell on any of it besides trying to plow through those emotionally tough scenes to get to the good, more uplifting stuff quickly and promptly.

Starring: Thomas Middleditch, Adam Pally, Alex Ross Perry, Nick Kroll, Brett Gelman, Jenny Slate, Aubrey Plaza, Jake Johnson, Joe Swanberg, Kris Swanberg, and Jude Swanberg. Directed by: Jeff Baena.