Theaters & VOD

Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite's cancer melodrama Our Friend doesn't waste any time letting viewers know what they are in for. The opening scene is an intense moment between Matt Teague (Casey Affleck) and his actress wife Nicole (Dakota Johnson) as they discuss having a serious talk with their daughters Molly (Isabella Kai) and Evie (Violet McGraw). It sets the stage for the tearful tragedy and heartbreak to come, pulling zero punches as it states in no uncertain terms: Nicole is going to die.

What follows is a nonlinear take on journalist Matthew Teague's 2015 Esquire article "The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word," adapted and augmented by screenwriter Brad Ingelsby (The Way Back). It not only follows the couple's battle against Nicole's ovarian cancer but also examines their deep friendship with college buddy Dane Faucheux (Jason Segel). He comes to live with the family as something of a live-in guest, nanny, and caretaker during the final year of Nicole's life, becoming an emotional backstop for the entire Teague clan right when they need it the most.

I can't say I feel like this approach always works particularly well. Even with little typed interstitials stating the time and place, I found it easy to lose track of where we were in the story at any given time. This also made it difficult to get a feel for the secondary supporting characters.

This was particularly frustrating when, at one crucial point, Matt lets a close friend of Nicole's know clearly that everyone, save probably Dane (but even on that point he's a little uncertain), will disappear from their lives one by one the closer they get to the end. Because I hardly knew who this person was, this had the unfortunate side effect of making a follow-up sequence where this premonition comes sadly true fall moderately flat.

Even though Cowperthwaite (Blackfish, Morgan Leavey) stages the moment beautifully, and although Affleck's silent, intuitively internal performance when Matt unexpectedly sees the offending party on an impromptu trip to the grocery store is nothing short of perfect, the scene itself still left me cold. It felt like an obvious piece of this three-dimensional puzzle that had to be removed if this collapsible pyramid of tragedy and grief was going to come to its inevitable conclusion later on, and because of that, its authenticity hit me as being more suspect than by all accounts it should have.

Cowperthwaite doesn't always appear to have a firm grasp on the interlocking pieces of the intricate, time-bouncing narrative, and I'm still not entirely sure why Ingelsby felt the need to structure things with such purposefully annoying convolution. There were moments where the inherently personal nature of the Teague family's story is lost in all the discombobulating narrative nonsense, lessening the impact of the final scenes substantially.

That's a shame, because the core trio is wonderful. As noted, Affleck grounds his performance in ways that are haunting. Johnson doesn't have quite as much to work with but still makes the most of each second of screen time. She brings unexpected moments of giddy, self-effacing playfulness to her portrayal of Nicole that are sublime. But the actress also has the ability to subtlely turn on a dime and showcase a myriad of interior emotional nuances that broke my heart, while also providing a salve to my wounded soul. Johnson stripped herself to the bone while bringing her character to life.

Then there is Segel. This is arguably his strongest work to date, the Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The End of the Tour actor stealing virtually every scene he is in. Dane's friendship with Matt and Nicole is heartbreakingly sincere. His love for them (and theirs for him) cascades off the screen like a pristine, humanistic waterfall. More than that, though, Segel taps into some dark, incredibly personal layers of longing and need that caught me by surprise, such as during a brief desert camping sojourn, where he encounters a magnetic fellow traveler (a divine Gwendoline Christie). Simply marvelous.

Yet none of my issues with the film stopped the tears from freely flowing by the time it reached its preordained conclusion, and to say I wasn't visibly moved would be a lie. Ultimately, the three performances from Affleck, Segel, and Johnson make Our Friend worthwhile. They all tap into something affectingly genuine: the poignant intimacy of their collective achievement, a life-affirming celebration of friendship, love, and family that I found difficult to resist.