‘A Real Pain’ review: Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg are cousins in a disarming 2024 film highlight

Everyone’s entitled to their opinions unless of course they’re dumb ones. Speaking of which, I never understood the dismissiveness when it came to Jesse Eisenberg.

The actor he grew into, with his Oscar-nominated turn in “The Social Network,” has so little regard for artifice that it’s an affront to many viewers’ needs in the rooting-interest department. He’s not leading with, “How do I make this character likable?” He leads with, “How do I make this character plausible and intriguing?” Eisenberg, who has also written plays and scripts and New Yorker essays and lots of music, may not be a shape-shifter or a chameleon of an actor, but he’s mighty sharp-witted. And when he’s right for a role, few American actors deploy shrewder timing or more purposeful dramatic subtlety.

Behind the camera as writer-director, Eisenberg has now made his second feature, “A Real Pain,” in which he co-stars. It’s quite wonderful. While Kieran Culkin’s performance has gotten a ton of attention — deservedly; he’s heartbreaking and funny, often in the same sentence or wordless close-up — the darting interplay between Culkin and Eisenberg sets up a simple, sure-handed tale of Jewish American family, identity and legacy, told in the unlikely form of a brisk, 90-minute road trip comedy.

David and Benji are cousins, once as close as close-knit brothers, now with some wary distance between them. Eisenberg plays David, who is married, a father and a New Yorker; Benji, portrayed by Culkin, is unmarried, apparently not employed and lives three hours outside New York City. He’s prone to extreme mood swings, and his brash recklessness has always been foreign territory to his tightly wound cousin.

In the aftermath of their Polish-born grandmother’s funeral, the cousins have planned a so-called “heritage tour” beginning in Warsaw and traveling to other cities. They’re also taking a side trip to search for their grandmother’s childhood home, which she fled with her family after the Nazi invasion. As “A Real Pain” spends a few days with David and Benji, and their tour cohorts, we watch them struggle to accommodate their very different comfort zones and perceived needs for this ancestral mission.

Eisenberg’s script makes time and room for the cousins’ fellow tour-goers as they visit, among other sites, the Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of the city of Lublin. They’re all good; the standouts include Jennifer Grey as a widower who becomes a kind of sounding board for Benji, and Kurt Egyiawan as a Jewish convert from Rwanda who has his own genocide stories to tell.

Reading that description, you may ask how an odd-couple comedy could possibly find its footing inside this larger framework. The key, I think, lies with Eisenberg’s instincts as an actor, which in “A Real Pain” translate beautifully to his instincts as a director. The early New York scenes, with shots of a tense David leaving message after unanswered message for Benji en route to JFK Airport, establish an urgency that carries over to the cousins’ trip abroad. In a few quick jabs of dialogue, Eisenberg’s script drops hints regarding Benji’s sociable nature. In the airport security line he takes a good long time, chatting up one of the TSA officers. “Her dad did security for the Knicks!” he explains later to his impatient cousin, brightly.

It’s the first of many instances of Benji’s insatiable curiosity potentially causing trouble, but somehow mostly not. He’s charming when he’s not falling apart, or misdirecting his anger, and in Culkin’s exquisite performance, we come to know a dimensional and deeply affecting human being.

With a wealth of Chopin on the soundtrack, and unusually vibrant and varied pacing courtesy of director Eisenberg and editor Robert Nassau, the cousins veer in and out of each other’s affections and mutual exasperations. Benji, who has the foresight to mail a big bag of marijuana to their Warsaw hotel from the U.S., is a born rule-bender, whether avoiding train fare while on board a train, for example, or finding the emergency door to an off-limits hotel rooftop. His mission with his uptight cousin, as he tells him, is to “fish out” the man, or boy, David once was.

On their last night with the group’s sweet, overexplanatory tour guide (Will Sharpe, just right), Benji has come undone by the sheer weight of his feelings for his late grandmother and her homeland. David, now alone with the group, spills his clenched feelings and the emotionally “baffling” reunion with Benji. “I want to kill him,” he says, through tears, “and I want to be him.” It’s a little on-the-nose, this monologue, not helped by the expected slow-zoom of the camera underlining the importance of the moment. You notice it because so much of the rest of “A Real Pain” happens without obvious inflections, spoken or visualized, or expected story beats. The movie’s final shot promises something other than a tidy, all’s-well future for the more troubled of the cousins, but it’s open to interpretation.

Families come together, and fall apart, and any two family members can find themselves somewhere in between together and apart. “A Real Pain,” shadowed by the Holocaust and the grandmother we never see, may be a modestly scaled second feature, but Eisenberg makes an enormous leap forward, coming off his promising directorial debut, “When You Finish Saving the World.”

The world with its perpetual devastations and hatreds may not be save-able. But the least we can do, Eisenberg’s film suggests, is remember who we were, and who we are to one another. Or what we can be.

‘A REAL PAIN’

3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language throughout and some drug use)

Running time: 1:30

How to watch: Now in theaters