“Cringe Comedy” is taken to the next level, and then some, in the intimately uncomfortable “Friendship,” a story of the broken state of bro bonding and on-the-spectrum oddness.

Writer-director Andrew DeYoung taps into a generation’s male isolation with a dark comedy that will make you squirm every time you laugh, especially if you see it with an audience. It is an open wound of insecurities hidden in a dark and darkly funny examination of “fitting in” and failing.

So God forbid you laugh when the rest of the audience watching it with you isn’t laughing.

“Saturday Night Live” veteran and “I Think You Should Leave” sketch comedy star and co-creator Tim Robinson plays an instantly off-putting tech nerd whose tactless, clueless inability to “read the room” is off the charts.

That’s established within moments in the opening scene as Craig (Robinson) and his wife Tami (Kate Mara) sit and listen and share in their support group.

Tami is fragile, wary and weary. She’s survived cancer, and everything about her screams “survived…for now.” She’s worried about how much of her life she’ll get back, and if she’ll “ever have another orgasm.”

Clueless Craig? He’s “Everything is AWESOME,” “We BEAT cancer” and “MY orgasms are just FINE, by the way.”

Good one, Craig. No, nobody in the group laughed.

They have a teen son (Jack Dylan Grazer) who is a lot closer to Mom than Craig will ever be. Is he her child from a previous relationship? Maybe this “Devon” she keeps talking about and meeting?

Craig is probably good at his job — working for a digital consulting firm that helps brands manipulate people into addiction to products, apps, people, etc. But it doesn’t take much for his subordinates and superiors to reveal their open contempt for the office weirdo.

“He’s odd man out for a reason!”

Mr. Insecurity enthuses about the wrong things, curses at the wrong times, overshares and dresses in the same khakis, sports coats and peculiar, hard-to-get, “only shoes that fit” deck shoes from a restaurant chain that “also sells food.”

He and the Out-of-His-League Mrs. are selling their ’70s style split-level, hoping to move somewhere bigger so that her Flowers by Tami florist business can flourish.

But a chance meeting with their new neighbor rocks Craig’s less-comfortable-than-he-thinks world. Because Austin (Paul Rudd) is everything he’s not, effortlessly “cool,” for starters.

Austin’s a local TV weatherman rocking a ’70s TV “Anchorman” pornstache. Austin is married, but plays in a punk band. And when he invites Craig on “an adventure,” he means it. It could be roaming Clovis city’s old sewer system and sneaking into city hall in the wee hours or hunting wild mushrooms when Craig’s supposed to be at work.

Craig fanboys along, and that gets him invited to a party with “just the guys,” Austin’s acolytes from his band and elsewhere. But not reading signals or being comfortable in such a setting dooms Craig to missteps. No, he doesn’t join in the screwy, impromptu sing-along to “My Boo.” But playing around with boxing gloves was sure to come to tears.

Craig kills the party, and in an instant, he’s as good as out. Austin’s deciding to “end this friendship” comes later.

The guy who “got speed bumps installed” in the neighborhood he’s trying to move out of, the fellow who should be fretting over why his wife is spending so much time with an ex or paying more attention to his just-getting-into-girls teen son becomes obsessed with being like Austin, getting back together with Austin or even replicating Austin’s bro pack on his own.

The “cringe” includes “men’s movement” subtexts and the sociology and psychology of manhood that sentences so many to lives of isolation and loneliness. The jokes have a cringy, Gen X topicality, as hapless Craig struggles with his feelings, his Austin-reunion fantasies and his misguided efforts to talk his son and the son’s latest girlfriend to join him at his new favorite bar.

“It’s 7:30 in the morning! We’re SIXTEEN!”

Robinson makes Craig equal parts pitiful and hilarious in scene after scene — forever losing a shoe on Austin’s “adventures,” always losing his Zenith cell phone, replacing it, and relying on the young salesman for something “a little stronger” than booze to help Craig get out of his own head, or further into it.

Rudd serves up a mature if still insecure version of his arrested development “I Love You, Man” character, someone who embraced his inner bro long ago. Everything’s cool as long as his pack adores him and doesn’t see it’s mostly a front.

Veteran TV writer and director DeYoung lures the viewer in and leads us in amused, faintly contemptuous but always nervous laughter. There’s shared pain beneath the laughs. Why DID this or that friend “move on” from us?

And DeYoung maintains suspense as his hero and his movie stagger towards the inevitable Chekhovian meltdown. Because no bro this disturbed and this “wronged,” at least in his own mind, can hallucinate his way out of the dilemma that his empty life forces him to confront.

Not without licking a toad, anyway.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Jack Dylan Grazer and Kate Mara.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Andrew DeYoung. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:40