Good Material

Your first clue that this romantic comedy is a break-up story is the list that kicks it off: Reasons Why It's Good I'm Not with Jen. Here begins Andy's obsessive wallowing. To be fair, he deserves a good wallow; he was blindsided when Jen ended their relationship with little explanation after four years. At thirty-five, Andy's a struggling comedian who's not always emotionally mature but who is self-aware enough of his toxic traits so as not to be totally intolerable. He copes with the break-up by leaning on his friends (many of them married with kids, almost none of them single), drinking copiously at the pub, phoning it in at his gigs, rebounding with a twenty-three-year-old Gen Z'er, and diving down the rabbit hole of nostalgia again and again. It would be easy to find him exhausting if he weren't written with such levity, but I found him so damn likable and sympathetic even while thinking, you've got to get it together, dude!

And then there's Jen's side of the story, which adds a new dimension to Andy's, highlighting problems you (and perhaps Andy) didn't know they had, which is infuriating as well as illuminating because while it takes two people to have a relationship, it only takes one to end it.