Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.On screen, Jesse Eisenberg hums with so much nervous energy, you feel jittery too. (Though wouldn’t it be great to see him update his killer nerd portrait of Mark Zuckerberg 15 years after The Social Network?) David Kaplan, his character in comedy-drama A Real Pain, is another jumpy customer, and a very Eisenberg dude. But New York family man David proves more than the sum of his neuroses, and the film, which the actor also writes and directs, is a pleasure to be around: sad and smart, with deceptive depth. It also has a talented co-star in Kieran Culkin. The Succession actor plays Benji, David’s extrovert cousin, accompanying him on a trip from the US to Poland, where their beloved late Jewish grandmother survived a concentration camp. At the airport, David is sombre. But Benji is just happy to be hanging out, and seemingly poised to smuggle weed into Europe.We have our set-up. Inseparable as kids, our two heroes now make a classic odd couple, even if that comic staple seems a strange fit indeed for the gravity ahead.The weed gives rise to a very good joke on arrival in Warsaw. (You won’t need to be stoned to laugh.) The cousins join a group of ticket-holders on a tour of Polish Holocaust sites. Benji’s frantic joie de vivre soon leads to high jinks at a war memorial. The sequence is less wince-inducing than it sounds, but there are deliberate tensions at work here, which the film gently explores. Not least among them is the realisation that free-spirited Benji has a far more troubled side. Secretly, he has a problem with David too.So then, a story exploring the frayed bond of comfortable American cousins against the backdrop of the Holocaust. You can almost hear the howl of Eisenberg’s anxiety at the potential for misjudgment. But remarkably, the film is a minor-key charmer, on exactly the right side of self-aware. It helps that Culkin is not far from faultless. Yet he also benefits from a deft director who balances the relationship of the mismatched Kaplans and the weight of history with wit and melancholy. Eisenberg can be a mixed blessing in front of the camera. Behind it, he is a tonic.★★★★☆In UK cinemas now and on Hulu in the US from January 16
