Bros (2022)

The "first" Hollywood studio gay rom-com could have rested on its laurels and just followed the rom-com formula but with two cute guys and likely it would have made a fortune. But Bros isn't that movie. Bros manages to be Schrödinger's rom-com, both a genre film leaning into the tropes one would expect, and also a clever rejection of all things rom-com at the same time. Yes there is a scene near the end when one lover runs to the other to win them back, but that's not really whats going on there either. It manages successfully to have its cake and eat it too. What's more queer than that?

Bros starts out with the bold assertion that love is not love is not love. This film and its hilarious star/writer reject the idea that queer love needs to hit into the heteronormative models reinforced in rom-com after rom-com. We're different the movie screams and it is in that difference that the real beauty is found. Courting here includes group sex, anonymous hook-ups, polyamory. The film doesn't shy away from discussing butt sex, and not as the butt (pun intended) of a joke, but as a legitimate part of life and love. 

And for a film that is all about two cis-white guys falling in love Bros manages to centre a whole parade of other intersectionalities confirming without reservation that the alphabet community truly is as diverse as the rainbow implies. Bros doesn't handle this with kid gloves. A huge part of what makes Bros so damn funny, and Bros is a seriously hilarious movie, is that it is a bunch of queer inside jokes that don't pull their punches. As queer people we get to make fun of ourselves and Bros does that in such a clever, empowering, self-depreciating, and just damn funny way. Eichner's triumph here is his script, one of the funniest and touching rom-coms I've come across in a long time. 

And it is also quite romantic. As I said Bros both manages to play into what works in the best rom-coms while also reinventing it in new ways, not just because it's two men at the centre of this story but because it is just doing it differently. Love isn't love, as Eichner sings near the end, and yet here we are falling in love with the genre all over again as we never have before. 

Bros

Starring: Billy Eichner, Luke Macfarlane, Ts Madison, Monica Raymund, Guillermo Diaz, Jim Rash, Bowen Yang, Harvey Fierstein, Dot Marie Jones, Peter Kim, Kristin Chenowith, Debra Messing, Ben Stiller, Kenan Thompson, Amy Schumer

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Writers: Billy Eichner, Nicholas Stoller