The conversation around Bros before and after its release has been so heavily shaped by its position in film history, the first major studio romantic comedy with an entirely LGBTQ+ principal cast, that the film itself has sometimes gotten lost in the discussion around what it represents. Both directions of that displacement are worth resisting; the film is not important primarily because of its demographics, and it is not good primarily because of its demographics. It is important because it is made with craft and honesty about its characters, and it is good for the same reasons any romantic comedy is good: the leads have real chemistry, the writing understands that genre conventions exist to be both honored and interrogated, and the film trusts its audience to follow it into territory that a less confident production would have softened.
Bobby Lieber (Billy Eichner, also co-writer) is a podcaster and museum director in New York whose investment in his own emotional unavailability is as elaborate as it is clearly defensive. He meets Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) at a party and begins a relationship with all the reluctance and self-sabotage that the genre typically allocates to its romantic obstacles. Jim Rash, TS Madison, Bowen Yang, Monica Raymund, and Amy Schumer also star.
The critical word in the film's marketing, that it represents a landmark in mainstream representation, is accurate and also somewhat beside the point of what makes the film work moment to moment. Bobby and Aaron are not characters who feel like the result of a gender-swap exercise applied to a pre-existing heterosexual screenplay. Both of them deal with identity questions, specifically around the internalized expectations of gay masculinity and the relationship between sexual identity and self-worth, that are embedded in who they are rather than applied to them from outside. The script understands the difference between making characters gay and making gay characters, and the distinction produces a film that feels observed rather than constructed.
Eichner's performance is the film's engine and its most precise instrument. Bobby's self-awareness about his own defensive patterns is not a substitute for actually changing them, and the film is clear-eyed about this distinction in a way that makes his eventual emotional breakthrough feel earned rather than scheduled. The monologue in which Bobby traces the origins of his confidence to a specific formative experience is the film's best scene and the one that most clearly illustrates what Eichner is capable of when the material meets him at his level. The sequence is cut to show Aaron's reaction alongside Bobby's delivery, and the editing here is the film's most visible technical shortcoming: Aaron's responses are not expressive enough to justify the intercutting, and the scene would have been more powerful allowed to run on Eichner without interruption.
The film's engagement with its own cultural context is one of its more interesting qualities. Bobby is specifically aware that the representation conversation is ongoing and frequently reductive, and the film is willing to be funny about that awareness rather than treating it as too fraught to touch. The audience score manipulation that the film experienced on aggregate review sites after its release, a coordinated effort to lower its rating through reviews clearly written without having seen it, is worth noting because it represents exactly the kind of bad-faith engagement with representation that the film itself anticipates and declines to be defeated by.
Bros is worth your time, despite what partisan players will try to promote. See it in a theater because it is the kind of film that deserves the communal viewing experience of a full theater and the word of mouth that follows it.
