The two men at the center of Lynn Shelton's unexpected Humpday were best friends in college but they might as well be strangers. Traveling the towns of Cambodia and Mexico, practicing his Kerouac, Andy (Joshua Leonard) has been everywhere and accomplished nothing except some sense of "experience." Ben (Mark Duplass) has been more productive (married homeowner with a steady job) but has played it safe. Andy has stories involving princesses who gave him gifts and hangover cures he learned in Machu Picchu; Ben has a loving wife whom he wants to get pregnant or, as he puts it, "we've removed the goalie and now we're just shooting free kicks."

No matter how different their lives, however, Andy and Ben are cut from the same cloth. They both detest domesticity but are obvious products of it and, to varying degrees, practitioners of it. When they spend a drunken night at a free-love domicile -- a communal house in the middle of Seattle called Dionysus -- they are inspired and vow, in two nights' time, to make a porno with each other; two straight men "bonin'." The lesbian tandem that run Dionysus, one-half of which is played by Shelton herself, thinks it's a brilliant idea, one that surely will win them the top prize for best amateur porn at the annual HumpFest -- an actual film festival presented by Seattle alterna-zine The Stranger.

The third player in this chamber comedy is Anna, Ben's wife, and she is played by superb newcomer Alycia Delmore. The instinct in such a bro-centric piece would be to make women the saints, the moral eye, but Shelton completely flips this around. In one of the film's best conversations, Anna wakes the morning after learning of Andy and her husband's plan and discloses that while visiting friends a few months ago, she made out with a stranger in a bathroom and it was "fantastic." She is not bitchy nor righteous when she says this; she is returning a harsh serve from a passively chauvinistic husband. Similarly, as Andy prepares for (what he hopes is) a threesome, he is disappointed to find that he is no match for a strap-on and, with his uniqueness displaced, dresses and leaves.

This is all, of course, a lead-up to the big finale with Andy and Ben preparing for their big-screen debut. A failed attempt at kissing begets stripping that is then questioned as "moving too fast," which begets a conversation on who pitches and who catches. Overlong by just a few measures, the scene is a killer, displaying the curt limits of generic heterosexuality. In an earlier scene, Ben confesses to Andy that he has entertained gay thoughts about a video clerk; he began noticing his big blue eyes and ended wondering about "his balls and how hairy they are." Scared of what it meant, Ben stopped going to the video store and was married not long after.

Akin in narrative to Kelly Reichardt's poetic Old Joy, what is most fascinating about Humpday is the way it inverts the Apatowian complex. Instead of bromance being the undercurrent or a theme, the very plot revolves around a debatably emotionless exercise in man-love. Ben and Andy have forged this "art project" in the hopes of proving that they are not as impossibly ordinary as they look, which of course they are. Does Shelton pity these fools or is this a critique of them? The film's final image makes me lean towards the former but the director is careful never to be conclusive. Shelton's film ultimately plays as behavioral experiment and, slapping their stomachs and chests in nervous rhythm, Ben and Andy are prime specimens.



Hey, we can make a porno too!