Endearing debut that tackles aging friendships

An instantly identifiable duo stands at the center of Adult best friends, Delaney Buffett’s endearing feature debut premiering at Tribeca. Delaney (Buffett) and Katie (Katie Corwin) are the kind of pals whose relationship spans decades and whose codependency runs deep. They met in seventh grade while taking refuge in the bathroom at a party. Old photographs, home videos and screen recordings of FaceTime calls perfectly encapsulate their friendship, proving that they have been inseparable ever since.

Nowadays, Delaney and Katie are still close but there are slight cracks. The couple became different types of people. Katie respects the pragmatic outlines of conventional adulthood. She lives with her boyfriend (Mason Gooding) and prefers an early morning ceramics class to a late night class. Delaney approaches life with more frankness, rejecting protocol in favor of intuition. She shares an apartment with a spiky friend (Cazzie David) and chokes at the thought of anything longer than a one-night stand. Her changing moods and chaotic days make Hannah Horvath’s life seem stable. Like Pamela Adlon’s Girls, Adult best friends is about the strangeness of aging – the tensions, ordinariness and weirdness inherent in changing friendships. Along with his co-writer (and real-life best friend) Corwin, Buffett tackles a familiar genre through a charming but thinly plotted seaside adventure.

Adult best friends has a single weekend, when Katie plans a surprise beach vacation for Delaney. The plan is to delicately announce her engagement to her friend, who struggles with change and rarely takes dramatic news well. From conversations Katie has with her fiancé John (Gooding) and older brother Henry (Zachary Quinto), we learn that the survival of this friendship depends on a dynamic in which Katie capitulates to Delaney’s needs and desires. This is an unfair arrangement for both women, who it appears have not been honest with themselves or each other for years. On the way to the beach – where exactly Adult best friends It’s not entirely clear what’s happening – a palpable nervousness hangs in the air.

Buffett’s film is based on the real chemistry between the two protagonists. As real-world friends, Buffett and Corwin, as Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau in Girls, have the proper story and comedic skills to make us buy the relationship between their characters. Although written with a light touch, the warmth between Delaney and Katie doesn’t feel manufactured. That…