Adam Baidawi

Justin Timberlake’s thespian turn was enviable enough. Friends With Benefits isn’t making things easier. 

The film opens with an ever-quippy Timberlake being reluctantly “sold” on moving to New York City, and “sold” on taking a job as GQ’s art director. And of course, Mila Kunis is doing the selling.

Make no mistake, Friends With Benefits is thinly veiled aspirational comedy for men: The New York! The Clout! The Mila! It’s exhilarating.

It opened number one at the box office, too.

The phenomenon of the homme-com—the male-driven romantic comedy—began with Hitch, arrived with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and will be passed on to Ryan Gosling's Crazy Stupid Love, out next month.

The sub-genre fills a void in the film market. Men are freely enjoying leads away from stoic stalwarts Bond and Bourne—but though their new protagonists are more relatable, aspiration has been kicked into overdrive.

Every detail of on-screen male life has been polished to meticulous perfection. Sartorial perfection, particularly. Crazy Stupid Love costume designer Dayna Pink had Gosling and co-star Steve Carell sort out their romantic lives while dashing about in Ermenagildo Zegna, Versace and Lanvin. The actualising spirit of premium lad-mags like GQ is being unabashedly realised on the silver screen. How faithfully, a minor detail.  

“I literally laughed out loud at the first shot of the ‘GQ building’ in Friends With Benefits,” said one GQ staffer in the wake of seeing his New York City offices re-imagined. Hollywood, naturally, afforded the magazine opulent glass walls, statuesque bystanders, and rich mahogany. (To be fair, the harshly lit, foamed-cubicle reality of glossies are hardly Timberlake-congruent.)

In 2004 Jude Law’s Alfie took on the modern male-driven romance, and lost. The box office disaster recouped a little over half its budget. It suffered from a little too much earnestness. (Or maybe a little too little Michael Caine.)

It was Hitch that breathed life into the concept—selling men on an authoritative lothario and grossing over $300 million along the way.

The silver bullet for the runaway homme-com success is its lack of wholesomeness. Despite plot arcs that start and end in familiar places, sincerity is used sparingly. Irreverence is king. Judd Apatow executes this with panache. Falling for the girl you met on vacation? Look up, man: Russell Brand and your ex are having boisterous, tantric sex. Lost deep in Mila Kunis’ Japanime eyes? She just called you a pussy.

Also important are the swift and refreshing maxims. 500 Days of Summer, for instance, taught us that neediness and a foppish haircut does not, in fact, make a sexy man. Like, not even in Zooey Deshanel's books.

With the genre has come a new breed of female lead: the Emma Stone, the Mila Kunis—pitched decidedly more down-to-earth than blockbuster-populating Foxes, Albas and Huntington-Whiteleys. Conveniently, they’re also more female-friendly.

But how self-aware is the homme-com? From the job to the apartment to the weather to the ubiquitous, get-the-body-double-in sex, you can’t help but feel Friends With Benefits gets it.

 “This looks normal,” quips Mila, lounging in the passenger seat of Justin’s menacing Audi convertible, en route to his family’s Malibu shack. Justin cranes his neck around, effortlessly powering into the driveway. 

“It is.”