One of the most unforgivable (and unforgettable) sins you can commit in youth, say around the sixth grade, happens when you’re desperate to join a new friend group. You want to be cool. You want to be part of their circle. So when someone cracks a joke, you laugh with everyone, then add your own hilarious rejoinder — and everyone just stares. Some invisible line has been crossed. You took the joke too far, and now it’s dead and, with it, your social life, your reputation and your chances of ever being happy again.

This feeling goes a long way toward explaining why “Friendship,” the new cringe-com starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, is often funny and always distressing. The feature debut of the writer and director Andrew DeYoung definitely shares DNA with “I Think You Should Leave,” Robinson’s hit Netflix comedy series, in which he usually plays a guy who can’t quite make out the social cues everyone else seems to follow without trying. So he’s always doing something bizarre, and it’s funny because it’s uncomfortable.

This makes Robinson the perfect, and possibly only, lead for DeYoung’s script. It’s about a man named Craig Waterman who has attained the markers of adulthood — a lovely wife (Tami, played by Kate Mara), a teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer) who still at least talks to him, gainful employment, a nice-enough house — but is functionally still the sixth grader in that friend circle.

Except Craig, being a certain variety of grown American man, doesn’t have friends, per se. He has Tami, who is almost unbelievably nice to him given he’s sort of a putz: obsessed with avoiding Marvel spoilers, loyal to only one brand of clothing that he apparently sources from a restaurant called Ocean View Dining. His co-workers joke around with one another on their smoke breaks, which he watches from his office window, nose all but pressed against the glass. Then, one day, he meets the new neighbor, Austin Carmichael (Rudd), who turns out to be the coolest guy Craig could imagine. Austin has a mustache. He’s the local weatherman. He plays in a band. He buys antique weaponry. He knows just which rules to break to have a good time.

So Craig develops a kind of obsession with Austin, not exactly the creepy kind but not exactly uncreepy, either. Hanging out with Austin, Craig can see a different future for himself, one in which he is a rad, manly, sought-after leader who jams out on the drums and impresses everyone around him. If Craig hangs out with Austin, people will want to be his friend, too.