Cousins ​​Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg) travel through Poland to commemorate their beloved grandmother A real pain.

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We live in a time of incessancy and shock normalization. Things that were once considered exaggerated – today's political discourse, for example, or television advertisements for ED – are now accepted as routine. These days, it no longer seems bizarre that there is an industry focused on taking tourists to Holocaust sites – with fancy food and hotels as part of the package.

One person who clearly finds this kind of tourism strange is Jesse Eisenberg. In fact, such a tour forms the backbone of A real paina quiet, exciting film that he wrote, directed and stars in. Eisenberg follows two cousins ​​on a tour of Jewish heritage in Poland and, in this high-spirited version of a road movie, tells a funny, moving and casually profound story about family and friendship, the weight of the Jewish past, the weight of every person's past, and the different ways of dealing with suffering.

Eisenberg plays David Kaplan, a wealthy, married advertising salesman who goes on this Polish tour with his cousin Benji – that's Kieran Culkin – a wounded soul with whom he was once quite close. At the end of their trip, they plan to visit the hometown of their recently deceased grandmother, who escaped from one of the camps. But first, under the eye of a well-meaning non-Jewish British leader – an excellent Will Sharpe – they join a small group that includes a melancholy divorcee, played by Jennifer Grey, and a Tutsi survivor of the Rwandan genocide – that is Kurt Egyiawan – include converts to Judaism.

As the group visits cemeteries and memorials and makes their way to the Majdanek extermination camp, David and Benji joke around, joke, reminisce about the past, smoke weed on Warsaw rooftops, and try to figure out a relationship that has developed over the course of time has changed over the years. While Eisenberg's David is stressed and responsible, Culkin's Benji suffers from a kind of Lenny Bruce-style manic depression – he can make everyone laugh with his sunny, profane directness and then plummet into emotional darkness. David envies Benji's drive to tell the truth. Benji envies David for having a wife and son who love him.

A real pain is an almost perfect little film whose little flaws humanize it – it's never overly arty. But it is artful, sharply written and directed with a keen sense of ambivalence and ambiguity; There are no cheap emotions in it. The scene where Benji and David arrive at their grandmother's house is a gem with shifting emotional and historical undertones.

And the stars are just great, playing clever riffs on two well-known guys. Eisenberg shines as an anxious good guy, preoccupied with work and his own head, who has difficulty seeing and emotionally connecting with the dissatisfied, in part because they make him feel guilty. Although David may actually learn more than his cousin on their journey, Benji is the flashier part and Eisenberg generously leaves him to his co-star.

Like his novel Roy in Consequence Culkin knows how to make us enjoy and sympathize with the pinball extravaganza of damaged men. His Benji may be in emotional distress, but he still sees the sadness in other people's eyes and refuses to pretend it's not there. While he gets the group to pose comically at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial – David maintains an uncomfortably respectful distance – Benji is also the tour participant who explodes at the importance of trains in Jewish history when they get on a Polish train travel in first class. “People can’t walk around happy all the time,” he snaps.

Although it's full of great jokes, A real pain tackle something big and difficult. It examines how we deal with pain, an inescapable reality that ranges from the epic horror of the industrial murder that disembowels David and Benji in the extermination camp to personal losses that are no less real for not being so great historically like the Holocaust.

Eisenberg's stunning film got me thinking in the easiest way possible about the different ways we deal with suffering, past and present. Should we just “get on with life,” as David seems to do, or should we absorb this pain, as Benji does? Or is there a way to do both somehow?