Review: 'A Real Pain' will take a piece out of you

It's a real pleasure to get lost in "A Real Pain," the second film -- following 2022's less successful "When You Finish Saving The World" -- starring, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. After finding a sweet spot at film festivals from Sundance to New York, "A Real Pain" debuts in theaters with its eye on the Oscar race, hitting you like a shot in the heart.

Consider it done. Loosely based on events from his own life, Eisenberg keeps hilarity and heartbreak in rigorous balance. "A Real Pain" can make you laugh out loud and ugly cry, and yet there's not a manipulative, sanctimonious, self-congratulatory minute in it. Not bad for a wildly entertaining odd-couple romp that references the Holocaust and suicidal ideation.

Let me explain: Eisenberg plays David Kaplan, a married Manhattan tech worker with a young son, who decides to bid the fam goodbye and take a week-long road trip to Poland with his screwup cousin Benji (an off-the-charts great Kieran Culkin), whose default mode is obnoxious.

Though their love is never in question, type-A David and wildcard Benji -- their fathers are brothers -- are polar opposites estranged since Benji moved upstate. Their beloved, recently deceased grandmother yearned for them to see her native Poland and understand how she grew up in a nurturing Jewish culture and escaped a Nazi death camp. Fun times, it wasn't.

But humor, however inappropriate, is an essential for Eisenberg. Benji -- who mails a stash of weed to his hotel in Warsaw -- is joining David on a so-called "Holocaust tour for Jews" with divorcee Marcia (Jennifer Grey, showing a maturity miles from her beginnings in "Dirty Dancing"), older couple Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes), and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), who fled the Rwandan genocide and later converted to Judaism.

Will Sharpe of "The White Lotus" plays James, the British tour guide and Oxford scholar who riles up Benji by packing too many factoids into his comments on the Jewish experience he doesn't know firsthand. Benji feels like a privileged jerk traveling first class on a train that once herded Jews to camps. Prickly tensions mount as the past pushes relentlessly into the present.

David shrinks from Benji's behavior, especially when he takes photos of himself at a Warsaw memorial to the Jewish insurgents. The others in the group, stirred by Benji's daring, do the same themselves. Unlike David, they're charmed by Benji's warmth and strafing wit.

It's hard not to share the feeling. But silence is the only response when the tour visits the Majdanek concentration camp, with its reminders of unspeakable genocide. And yet sad, funny, haunted Benji remains a life force, an unleashed id that honors Jewish survival.

Is this really proper material for a comedy? It shouldn't be, but Eisenberg's provocative and prizeworthy original screenplay makes it so.

A climactic image of Benji alone in an airport teeming with travelers speaks volumes. Eisenberg and Culkin are both terrific, but the director cedes his film to his costar, who might soon have an Oscar to bookend the Emmy he won for "Succession."

Still, awards are icing on the cake compared to the substantial issues at the film's core. It's a movie that makes you laugh till its hurts without ever losing its humanity. Veering precariously between light and dark, "A Real Pain" will take a piece out of you.