Acerbic and bleak but somehow not hopeless, writer-director John Magary's debut feature “The Mend” — opening at the IFC Center in New York on August 21 — is a razor-sharp dual character study of two very different brothers (and their very different lovers). Alan (Steven Plunkett) is a buttoned-up law school grad who lives with Farrah (Mickey Sumner) in Harlem. He's the younger sibling of Mat (Josh Lucas), a crude, careless black sheep embroiled in an on-again, off-again relationship with single mom Andrea (Lucy Owen). Mat gets kicked out of Andrea's apartment, where he's evidently been mooching off her good graces; his only belongings, including a very shitty early '00s laptop, can fit in a small backpack. Temporarily homeless, Mat makes his way uptown and crashes a party at his brother's apartment, a celebration for the dance company that Farrah is involved with. They haven't seen each other in three months.The occasion marks the film's first great set piece, a sprawling, fluid scene that sets up the major relationships through a haze of booze, pot, artistic ego, and libido. (“Bohemia,” Mat snarks at one of the invited guests.) It's clear that Alan and Farrah's relationship is on the fritz; he's a know-it-all, a bore, too cautious to draw sparks. Mat couldn't be more his opposite: A manspreading beast, barrel-chested and lewd — and a grifter, who evidently makes his living taking down-deposits on website designs he never delivers. The party is given room to unspool at a leisurely pace, from its manic high points to the morning-after fug. At some point in the night Earl (Austin Pendleton) stops by, a septuagenarian raconteur who regales the group with tales of X-rated exploits in the '70s that he shared with Mat and Alan's father. (Pendleton, whose loopy, goofy good humor truly buoys “The Mend,” was also a stand out in Young Jean Lee's “Straight White Men” — a play about brotherly entanglements that might well have been an inspiration for Magarty.) Post-party, Alan and Farrah wake up late, nearly missing their plane en route to a Canadian vacation that's meant to save their relationship. Unbeknownst to them, Mat is passed out in a storage room. He stumbles into consciousness in the suddenly empty apartment, which he proceeds to take over in his brother's absence — inviting the now on-again girlfriend, Andrea, and her son, to come enjoy the borrowed digs.The joy of “The Mend” is in the ensemble acting, so I don't feel too bad giving away a bit of the plot here — Alan returns earlier than expected, seemingly dumped in the middle of Canada by his perhaps now ex-girlfriend. He sadsacks around the apartment alternately enraged at and enamored of Mat. It's a testament to Magary's script that it's basically impossible for the viewer to have a fixed opinion of any of these characters, all of whom oscillate between the lovable and the obnoxious. Mat — lurching around the apartment, breaking shit, hawking up phlegm, with a bit of the burly energy of a young Marlon Brando, had he bathed less often — is either a misunderstood genius or the Platonic ideal of rock bottom. Alan, who initially seems the very definition of bland, blossoms in his younger brother's bad company. The film's female characters are vital here, but admittedly “The Mend” (as its title might winkingly admit) is a story about men: their stupidity and brutishness, the clumsy ways they connect, or fail to. There are no happy endings or clear resolutions. The prevailing vibe of the film, helped along by an anxious, high-strung classical soundtrack, is one of barely submerged, never-consummated dread — in this respect “The Mend” is a tonal cousin to another film about driftless 30-something males in New York, Rick Alverson's “The Comedy.” (Press materials also draw a deserved comparison to Bruce Robinson's 1987 “Withnail & I” — a movie that I'm still amazed many otherwise well-rounded people have not seen — and the relationship between Mat and Alan definitely shares some of that same spirit, especially as they descend further into the proverbial gutter).Alan, explaining his brother's somewhat unwelcome presence in his apartment to co-workers, strives to be diplomatic. Mat, he says, is “a lot.” The same could be said of “The Mend,” which crams a great deal into its chatty 111 minutes. Magary's true success is in presenting two conflicting, but somehow equally appealing, models of masculinity. It's clear that Mat aches to be Alan, in some way, and that Alan also aches to be Mat — some impossible hybrid of the family-man and the brute might result — but instead each warily orbits the other, simultaneously his sibling's envy and cautionary tale.
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