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I’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy which uses a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be.

Youngish marrieds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are comfortably, chastely slumbering in their pleasant Seattle home when they’re awoken in the middle of the night by the unexpected ding-donging of the doorbell. The uninvited guest is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s college buddy, who has flown in without announcement from Mexico City and is looking for a place to crash. We don’t know how long it’s been since Andrew and Ben were last on the same side of the equator, but we get the sense it’s been awhile — for one thing, Andrew and Anna have never met. Ben tells his wife it’s “typical Andrew” when their houseguest goes out the next day, meets a bisexual girl at a coffeeshop and ends up back at her dimly-lit playhouse, making fettucine for his new lady friend and her old lady. But when the straightt-laced husband goes to retrieve his friend and ends up staying into the wee hours of the morning smoking, drinking, and eventually goading his free-spirit bro into promising to “perform” with him on camera for an amateur porn film festival –– all the while missing a planned romantic dinner with the anxious-to-conceive Anna –– we’re to understand that this is the furthest thing imaginable from “typical Ben.”

In the harsh light of sobriety, both men have an easy out, but neither is man enough to take it. Ben “feels compelled” to follow through with the porning, apparently because he needs to prove (somewhat predictably) that his marriage is different, and not the steel cage Andrew makes it out to be; Andrew is anxious to acquire evidence that his lifelong rebellion against squaresville hasn’t been a big joke, especially after an abortive tryst points up his own sexual prudishness. Shelton lets us in from the beginning on the truth — the plan is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and both dudes are self-deluded –– which makes it all the more comedically rewarding to watch Ben and Andrew slowly puzzle it all out.

The clear-cut theme of many an Apatow comedy is that bros will be bros … until women come along and offer a “better,” more civilized option. Humpday is, refreshingly, not as black and white. Anna is a fully-fleshed out complement to Ben, capable of being just as selfish and single-minded. Neither could pull off the magic act of saving the other from his/her own worse instincts. It may not be a totally fair comparison, but the women in Humpday feel much more real than the love interests often seen in Duplass Brothers films, whether it be the marriage-obsessed shrew of The Puffy Chair or the insecure temptresses of Baghead. Shelton’s film presents grown-up relationships as the complex things they are: sometimes a haven, sometimes a prison, always a thorny nest of compromises and outright lies that are nonetheless basically the best thing we’ve come up with in order to stave off fear of dying alone.

I saw a Twitter message this morning praising Humpday as “not too mumblecoreish.” To use that ad hoc genre as a perjorative is, in this case, missing the point of Humpday’s construction. Shot with handheld cameras, entirely improvised by the actors based on character work and extensive rehearsal, and edited with rigorous, documentary inspired formalism by Nat Sanders (who also cut Medicine for Melancholy), Humpday takes the ripped-from-real-life spirit of the films Duplass has made with his brother Jay (not to metion the work of Joe Swanberg; Shelton co-starred in his web series Young American Bodies and appeared briefly in Nights and Weekends) and applies it to that very in-vogue subgenre, the comedy of macho male fallibility. The technique wrings unexpected layers from the content, and vice versa. More grown up (and interested in the emotional pitfalls of what it means to grow up) than many recent American DIY films, and far more accessible to a non-film-savvy audience than Duplass’ last Sundance entry Baghead, Humpday may usher in the moment when some notable tropes of what we once called mumblecore can be successfully applied to more mainstream genre fare without the uinitiated turning off.