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 Romantic comedies tend to be lousy. This is a given that director Will Gluck's Friends with Benefits uses to its advantage. It revels in poking fun at the formula that of course it won't be able to avoid: pretty people fall in love, trouble ensues, and all is resolved in a way that never happens to you. The latest, and most charming, of a string of no-strings-attached spins on the rom-com, Friends with Benefits even features a pretend movie within the movie, starring (in uncredited cameos) a fat Jason Segel and a deliberately insipid Rashida Jones, exemplifying exactly the kind of saccharine love story that Friends with Benefits is trying to be better than yet still provides the inspiration for the climax. 
 
 Dylan (Justin Timberlake) is the art director for a popular website based in Los Angeles, where his father (Richard Jenkins) and sister (Jenna Elfman) live. He is lured to Manhattan by a headhunter, Jamie (Mila Kunis), who has been hired to recruit an art director for Gentleman's Quarterly. (And you thought they just consulted the rest of the media elite when making such decisions.) Both of them are freshly dumped  Dylan by a girlfriend (Emma Stone, the star of Gluck's Easy A) who accuses him of being emotionally unavailable, Jamie by a dude (Andy Samberg, Timberlake's partner from the SNL short "Dick in a Box") who says she's emotionally damaged. While Dylan and Jamie have instant sparks, they opt not to get involved. Instead they make a weird pact to just service each other without letting romance intervene, as did Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman in January's No Strings Attached. (Video: Watch Timberlake accept a Marine Ball date request) 
 
 They arrive at this decision after watching the fake Segel-Jones movie together. Jamie can mouth the lines to this cherished love story but wonders why no one ever makes a movie about what happens after the first kiss. "They do," retorts Dylan. "It's called porn." Considering how much time Timberlake and Kunis spend hovering on top of and between each other's lovely limbs, there's definitely something of the soft porn appeal to Friends with Benefits. They have raunchy, frank conversations about sex, and though there are more carefully tangled sheets in this movie than in any normal bedroom, the imperfect but steadily improving sex they have is about as close to realistic as a Hollywood romantic comedy ever gets. 
 
 Hollywood could be the third billed star of Friends with Benefits, even with Woody Harrelson hamming it up as GQ's kinda-gross horny gay sports editor. It's present as both place (on a visit to Los Angeles, Dylan and Jamie climb the Hollywood sign together) and concept (it hangs over these young people, shaping not only their closely held romantic fantasies but also their cynicism, their won't-get-fooled-again attitudes). Old movies like On the Waterfront and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice play on screens in the background. There are references to Nora Ephron, Harry Potter, Seinfeld and Will & Grace as well as some swipes at the novels of Nicholas Sparks, Katherine Heigl's movie career and George Clooney's commitment issues. Jamie and Dylan inhabit an intensely pop-culture-centric, tech-savvy world; when they make their no-love lovemaking pact, they do it on her singing Bible app. Timberlake bursts into apt parodies of 90s songs on multiple occasions, reminding you that before he was an actor, he was a song and dance man. Special: See Top 10 Long-Running Movie Franchises 
 
 All this self-referential, intensely of-the-moment business nearly overpowers the movie's emotional side. My hunch is that when Gluck rewatches this movie in 10 years, he'll ask himself, Why did I clutter things up by casting that red-haired snowboarding kid Shaun White? Playing himself, White takes you out of the mood of the love story. So does the cinematography. Kunis is lit as if it were always magic hour, Timberlake as if it were a dewy morning, even when they're standing right next to each other. And the camera is so up in their faces, you start to feel an aesthetician's urge to go to work. 
 
 The screenplay, with credits shared by Gluck, Keith Merryman and David A. Newman, is predictable, plotwise. But it is elevated by energetic dialogue, the sexual chemistry between the leads and the fact that the miscommunication that keeps bliss at bay  there's always one in a rom-com, and usually it is annoyingly unbelievable  is plausible. The lithe Kunis, all tough girl talk and tawny eyes, is 10 times more interesting than a Heigl or a Hudson. Timberlake looks a little lost when it comes to the movie's dramatic contrivance of Dylan's dad's struggle with Alzheimer's, but he is an absolutely adroit comedian. There's a scene in which Jamie reassures Dylan that she'll be fine spending the Fourth of July alone. Impatiently, he tells her he knows that she'll be physically fine: "You're not a baby in a hot car." It takes someone either really fast on his feet or super cute to get away with a joke that dark and tasteless. In Timberlake's case, it's both. 
 
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 All-TIME 100 Movies ||||| A running conceit in the new romantic comedy Friends With Benefits is that Dylan (Justin Timberlake) and Jamie (Mila Kunis) think romantic comedies are stupid. Romantic comedies posit the existence of true love—how silly! They portray New York in an unrealistic light, providing a tourist's version of the city. When Dylan and Jamie decide to try out a relationship with "no emotions … just sex" and swear that "whatever happens, we stay friends," they convince themselves that they can pull off this trick because they're real people, not Hollywood figments. 
 
 I'm not sure if it's a joke or an irony that, aside from the heavy cursing and the shots of Timberlake's bare bottom in fairly graphic sex scenes—you see him clench—Friends With Benefits is every bit as generic as the rom-coms its characters mock. No New Yorker would go from Rockefeller Center to Prince Street for a workday lunch; that's insanity. And I don't think I'm giving too much away by stating that Dylan and Jamie eventually do fall in love. The film draws attention to Hollywood clichés, then stumbles right into them. 
 
 There's one cliché so ingrained in pop culture, however, that Friends With Benefits doesn't even bother to hold it up for scrutiny before succumbing to it: Straight men and women are never "just" friends. Dylan and Jamie don't seem to notice that going from buddies to fuck buddies is as hackneyed a move as visiting Times Square. 
 
 It's not surprising that Hollywood generally depicts romantic rather than platonic relationships—the former are more exciting and lend themselves to narrative arcs. But, as I've said before, the situation is more extreme than that: When movies do portray a cross-sex friendship, they almost always dismiss it, contending, implicitly, that platonic love is impossible. There is virtually no such thing as true male-female friendship in the movies, only friends with benefits, or friends who wish they had benefits, or friends who are about to have benefits. 
 
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 At this point, some readers are probably thinking—wait a minute, that's not a movie-truth, that's a truth-truth. As I discovered when I wrote about my 15-year-and-counting sexless relationship with my best friend, Jeff, many people deny that there is such a thing as platonic love. These people seem largely un-convinceable, but I'll note that in the course of researching that essay I heard from plenty of Slate readers who claim to have such relationships, and that a 2002 survey conducted by the magazine American Demographics found that more than 1 in 10 adults age 25 to 35 have a best friend—not just a pal or an acquaintance—of the opposite sex. 
 
 The classic Hollywood it-can't-happen thesis is that friendship necessarily bleeds into romance, like in When Harry Met Sally … . As Harry puts it, men and women can never be friends because "the sex part always gets in the way," and the movie bears this out. A variation on the theme is the frustration narrative, in which one member of the friendship wants a romantic relationship and the other does not. Duckie loves Andie in Pretty in Pink, but Andie loves Blaine. Midge loves Scottie in Vertigo, but Scottie loves the mysterious Madeleine. Very occasionally a movie depicts a true friendship, but it's usually a sideline to a romance that's given minimal screen time. In Say Anything Lloyd has not one but three female friends, and there's no indication that he has feelings for any of them or that they have feelings for him—but the movie's not about that; it's about Lloyd's love for Diane. 
 
 The other major exception is relationships between gay men and straight women. These abound, both on TV and in the movies. Take My Best Friend's Wedding, in which Julianne realizes she's in love with best-bud Michael on the occasion of his engagement. The relationship between Julianne and Michael was never "just" a friendship, but we get the genuine article in Julianne's friendship with George—who's gay. This exception isn't much of one, though; conceding that sex won't happen if it's actually distasteful to one of the participants does nothing to chip away at the received idea that, if it's not distasteful, it's inevitable. 
 
 Like this spring's No Strings Attached and 2008's Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Friends With Benefits updates the When Harry Met Sally … theory. In these films friendship leads inexorably to love, just like it always has, but it's not sex that gets in the way of friendship so much as love that gets in the way of sex. "We tried to fuck and, instead, we wound up making love," says Zack in Zack and Miri. "I want my best friend back, because I'm in love with her," says Dylan, after a fight makes him realize that there was more to the relationship than physicality. 
 
 Friends With Benefits seems awfully proud of its edginess. There's a lot of sex (fun sex, not weepy sex), and lots of talk about sex. But it would be a far, far less conventional movie if, instead of jumping into bed and then falling in love, Dylan and Jamie never got into it at all. 
 
 To read a slide-show essay on male-female "friendship" in the movies from the 2010 "Strictly Platonic" Series, click on the player below. 
 
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– Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis may not break any new ground in Friends With Benefits, but critics are largely giving the sex-filled rom-com the thumbs up: "The jokes don't all work and the topical references can be irritably hipper-than-thou," writes Andrea Gronvall of the Chicago Reader. "But at least director and cowriter Will Gluck (Easy A) aims high." Time's Mary Pols writes, "It is elevated by energetic dialogue, the sexual chemistry between the leads and the fact that the miscommunication that keeps bliss at bay— there's always one in a rom-com, and usually it is annoyingly unbelievable—is plausible." "Friends With Benefits isn't nearly as original as it pretends to be," writes Elizabeth Weitzman of the New York Daily News. "But it's cute and funny and sweet, which—as any woman can attest—puts it way ahead of most Friday night options. But it's not just cute: it's sex-filled, notes Juliet Lapidos for Slate. "There's a lot of sex (fun sex, not weepy sex), and lots of talk about sex." But "aside from the heavy cursing and the shots of Timberlake's bare bottom in fairly graphic sex scenes—you see him clench—Friends With Benefits" is pretty generic in terms of rom-coms.