Bros’ perfectly tuned romantic comedy buckles under the weight of the gay rom-com milestone

polygon.com:

There’s been a lot of Making History bandied about in the marketing onslaught leading up to the premiere of Bros, the new film written by and starring Billy Eichner. It’s “the first gay romantic comedy from a major studio featuring an entirely LGBTQ principal cast,” with Eichner being touted as “the first openly gay man to write and star in a major studio film.” The oddly self-serious campaign, the kind of buzzy heralding of importance that would typically accompany an award-bait prestige drama, seems to undercut the simple revolutionary act of just making another studio rom-com, this time centered on two dudes in love.

Sitting down and watching the film, however, it’s clear this tension between the important and the conventional is the defining conflict of the film. For all its virtues, Bros is a bit of a frustrating watch, a lovely Nora Ephron-esque charmer buried somewhere underneath the self-imposed burden of representing “5,000 years of queer love stories,” a tug-of-war between the micro and macro that nearly squanders its sunny central romance with an attempt (however noble) to be all things to all people.

The plot concerns Bobby Lieber (Eichner), a queer podcaster and curator of New York City’s first LGBTQ history museum. Bobby is opinionated and proudly single, but his defenses melt away when he meets Aaron (Hallmark movie mainstay Luke Macfarlane), a macho-bro estate lawyer who’s as emotionally impenetrable as he is a total dreamboat. Their meet-cute, amidst a swirling vortex of vogueing club gays, feels like the proper 21st-century queer version of a NYC love story. Add in a score by Marc Shaiman and a bounty of Nat King Cole needle-drops, and you’d think this Gay When Harry Met Sally would be off and running.