So frequently does New York-based independent filmmaker Simon (Tristan Turner) repeat the shaggy one-line pitch for the documentary he’s working on — it’s “a nostalgia-piece travelogue about past, present and future, a eulogy for lost history” — that he’s probably long stopped thinking about what it actually means. If, indeed, it means anything at all. Simon’s life, too, has taken on the same unexamined shapelessness, as the early-thirtysomething keeps waiting for some undefined break, breakthrough or eureka moment, while doing very little to make it happen for himself. An unassuming but perceptive debut feature from writer-directors Travis Wood and Alex Mallis, “The Travel Companion” observes an artist’s supposedly roving spirit critically at odds with his manchild dependencies.
Which isn’t to say it’s an unsympathetic portrait. Gradually rolling out across the U.S. in limited release following its premiere in last year’s Tribeca festival competition, “The Travel Companion” certainly knows its protagonist’s creative world: It opens and closes with the kind of unpolished post-screening Q&A session that Wood and Mallis have likely sat through several times over. The film is amusing as it satirizes the vagaries and hierarchies of the American indie-film rodeo (where a stated “1.5” budget is misunderstood by one dazzled, aspiring director as $150,000, not $1.5 million) but not cruelly so. Wood and Mallis show a poignant understanding of the desperation driving still-young filmmakers anxious that they’ve missed their moment, clinging to anyone carrying even a faint smell of success.
For Simon, that’s Beatrice (Naomi Asa), a plainly talented go-getter who initially takes kindly — perhaps too kindly — to his over-eagerness. At the works-in-progress showcase event that opens the film, she makes an impression on the audience, while time runs out before he even gets to answer a question. When they go for drinks afterwards, Simon is once more the third wheel, as she hits it off with his longtime bestie and roommate Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck).
Bruce, an airline worker, has hitherto handed off his plus-one flight privileges to Simon, who keenly exploits them to keep filming his globe-trotting doc. But the cracks are showing in this lopsided bromance. Bruce needs Simon considerably less than Simon needs Bruce — who, as he and Beatrice settle into a relationship, proves rather more ready to take a committed step into adulthood. “The Travel Companion” thus follows a long line of triangulated male-crisis comedies in which a woman disrupts an immature fraternal dynamic, but with the more interesting wrinkle that Beatrice (deftly played by Asa with warm self-possession and visibly fraying patience) is pretty much who Simon himself would like to be.
As envy, insecurity and imposter syndrome jostle for pole position in Simon’s narcissistic headspace, the film threatens a pivot into more intriguingly black-comic territory, or into a more metatextual send-up of indie-movie tropes and aesthetics. But even as it dabbles in toe-curling cringe comedy, “The Travel Companion” is ultimately too genial a work for such tonal extremes. It likes its characters — even Simon, whose increasingly aggravating behavior is counterbalanced by the hangdog earnestness of Turner’s performance — too much to punish or humiliate any of them too severely, while even Simon’s film improbably takes shape by the end.
There is, however, a pleasing recognition here that certain relationships and phases in life are finite. Shot with strolling ease and a casually burnished glow by DP Jason Chiu, “The Travel Companion” may find most of its characters at an early, transitional stage of their professional lives, but the cooling air of autumn around Simon and Bruce’s friendship — which, it seems, has lasted since childhood without ever rooting itself soul-deep — is palpable, and quite affecting. While people like Simon wait for big ideas to strike them, there are whole movies in these little everyday losses, and Wood and Mallis have made one.
