‘The Travel Companion’ Assessment: A Bromance Goes Adrift

So steadily does New York-based unbiased filmmaker Simon (Tristan Turner) repeat the shaggy one-line pitch for the documentary he’s engaged on — it’s “a nostalgia-piece travelogue about past, present and future, a eulogy for lost history” — that he’s in all probability lengthy stopped interested by what it really means. If, certainly, it means something in any respect. Simon’s life, too, has taken on the identical unexamined shapelessness, because the early-thirtysomething retains ready for some undefined break, breakthrough or eureka second, whereas doing little or no to make it occur for himself. An unassuming however perceptive debut function from writer-directors Travis Wood and Alex Mallis, “The Travel Companion” observes an artist’s supposedly roving spirit critically at odds along with his manchild dependencies.

Which isn’t to say it’s an unsympathetic portrait. Gradually rolling out throughout the U.S. in restricted launch following its premiere in final yr’s Tribeca pageant competitors, “The Travel Companion” actually is aware of its protagonist’s artistic world: It opens and closes with the type of unpolished post-screening Q&A session that Wood and Mallis have probably sat via a number of occasions over. The movie is amusing because it satirizes the vagaries and hierarchies of the American indie-film rodeo (the place a said “1.5” price range is misunderstood by one dazzled, aspiring director as $150,000, not $1.5 million) however not cruelly so. Wood and Mallis present a poignant understanding of the desperation driving still-young filmmakers anxious that they’ve missed their second, clinging to anybody carrying even a faint odor of success.

For Simon, that’s Beatrice (Naomi Asa), a plainly gifted go-getter who initially takes kindly — maybe too kindly — to his over-eagerness. At the works-in-progress showcase occasion that opens the movie, she makes an impression on the viewers, whereas time runs out earlier than he even will get to reply a query. When they go for drinks afterwards, Simon is as soon as extra the third wheel, as she hits it off along with his longtime bestie and roommate Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck).

Bruce, an airline employee, has hitherto handed off his plus-one flight privileges to Simon, who keenly exploits them to maintain filming his globe-trotting doc. But the cracks are displaying on this lopsided bromance. Bruce wants Simon significantly lower than Simon wants Bruce — who, as he and Beatrice settle right into a relationship, proves somewhat extra able to take a dedicated step into maturity. “The Travel Companion” thus follows a protracted line of triangulated male-crisis comedies wherein a lady disrupts an immature fraternal dynamic, however with the extra attention-grabbing wrinkle that Beatrice (deftly performed by Asa with heat self-possession and visibly fraying persistence) is just about who Simon himself wish to be.

As envy, insecurity and imposter syndrome jostle for pole place in Simon’s narcissistic headspace, the movie threatens a pivot into extra intriguingly black-comic territory, or right into a extra metatextual send-up of indie-movie tropes and aesthetics. But even because it dabbles in toe-curling cringe comedy, “The Travel Companion” is in the end too genial a piece for such tonal extremes. It likes its characters — even Simon, whose more and more aggravating conduct is counterbalanced by the hangdog earnestness of Turner’s efficiency — an excessive amount of to punish or humiliate any of them too severely, whereas even Simon’s movie improbably takes form by the top.

There is, nevertheless, a delightful recognition right here that sure relationships and phases in life are finite. Shot with strolling ease and a casually burnished glow by DP Jason Chiu, “The Travel Companion” might discover most of its characters at an early, transitional stage of their skilled lives, however the cooling air of autumn round Simon and Bruce’s friendship — which, it appears, has lasted since childhood with out ever rooting itself soul-deep — is palpable, and fairly affecting. While individuals like Simon wait for large concepts to strike them, there are entire motion pictures in these little on a regular basis losses, and Wood and Mallis have made one.