As meet-cute films go, there are probably worse premises than a man who winds up hanging out with the guy who cuckolded him. Uptight novelist Bert (Matt Oberg) discovers his cold-fish wife has been steaming up the sheets with handsome Arnie (Stephen Schneider), a lothario with bad manners and worse morals.
Bert’s wife leaves him, and he takes a job teaching his own novels to a captive audience of college undergraduates. One student (a standout Cristin Milioti, uttering her come-hither lines through a nasty case of post-nasal drip) offers to sleep with Bert if he’ll get her an internship. Arnie, meanwhile, begins to reconsider his boorish ways when he falls for his boss (Anna Chlumsky of “Veep”) and realizes she may be using him in the way he’s always used women.
All this transpires in scenes that play more like skits, though some are pretty funny. The title is a misnomer; the friendship is late in coming and uninvolving when it arrives. The two leads spend a lot of their time doing static interviews, in a format familiar from TV shows like “The Office.” This glorified narration gets old, fast.
There’s the germ of a role-reversal idea: The jerk has a sentimental center and the nerd has a jerk inside waiting to get out. But surely it’s more fun to discover that by seeing them interact more with each other, and less with the camera.