Harry Michell’s low-budget debut feature is a terrifically funny and smart quarterlife-crisis comedy with great dialogue riffs and a nice line in insouciant gloom. Two young actors share a flat in London: the pudgily insecure Oscar (played by Michell) and his more attractive, high-cheekboned mate, Charlie (Augustus Prew).
The film starts where Withnail & I ended: with one of them getting cast. Charlie gets a part in a classy stage Shakespeare, but poor Oscar has only a telly advert for chocolate and a day job as a door-to-door charity mugger. Charlie and Oscar have the same agent (Alice Lowe), who says Charlie is the attractive romantic lead, while Oscar must accept his professional destiny of playing the unthreatening cuddly friend: “chubby funny”.
Oscar hangs out with Charlie a lot and also has a quasi-sexual friendship with wannabe journalist Sophie – nicely underplayed by Isabella Laughland. But his career stalls; he can’t pay his half of the rent, and sexual rivalry opens up when an attractive date of his likes Charlie more. The two guys’ banter sours and they are left with … what?
There is some shrewd talk about white, middle-class privilege, which may be a little pre-emptive self-satire on the director’s part: his father is the director Roger Michell, who has an executive producer credit here and whose connections possibly mobilised this film’s tremendous supporting cast. There is also a brilliant and excruciating scene where Oscar has a drink with his old English teacher (David Bamber), who directed him in a school production of Hamlet.
