A Real Pain is one of those movies that feels like a gut punch you want to take over and over again. It’s a beautiful work of art that simmers with drama and emotion. Screenwriter, director, and star Jesse Eisenberg did a masterful job of weaving emotional relationship-building with a story that is as much an internal journey as it is an external one. Both Eisenberg’s character, David Kaplan, and Kieran Culkin’s Benji Kaplan, are broken in their own way, and those fissures are exacerbated when they come into contact with each other.

The brilliance in the screenplay and the film lies in the fact that they’re cousins who are forced to spend time together on a pilgrimage to see the birthplace of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who recently passed away and had vastly different relationships with the two of them. David is (almost painfully) introverted and a rule follower. He can’t mask his discomfort when things go against protocol, and he does his level best just to go along to get along. He’s strait-laced and plays life by the rules as an adult with a good job, a wife, a child, and a comfortable home. It seems important to him that everyone likes him.

Benji, on the other hand, wears his heart on his sleeve and doesn’t flinch in telling people his true feelings, however much discomfort that might bring to the situation. He is emotional, loud, and vibrant, and he never has a thought that he doesn’t express. It’s not as important to him to be liked, but his upfront nature, while off-putting at the moment, earns him the respect of almost everyone who meets him.

These two divergent personalities are thrust together on a trip that reveals to both of them what they need to fix, but in a very satisfying way, leaving them without the motivation to fix it. Often, in films like this, we’re presented with broken characters who go through an emotional meat grinder that is the story and end up fixed at the end.

Warning! Spoilers!

There is no such fairytale ending in this script. Movies like that are great. Alexander Payne is the master of fixing broken characters, and his films are wonderful. However, A Real Pain gives us the brutal reality that things aren’t always ready to be tied up in neat little bows. The film’s title is descriptive. There is real pain in this film, and that kind of pain isn’t healed overnight. It also isn’t healed if the person feeling it isn’t ready, able, or willing to heal it. That might make some people feel like this long internal journey resulted in a dead end, but that isn’t the way it really feels at all. This is a story about confronting your pain. Whether you get over it or not is immaterial. The act of confronting it, acknowledging it, and experiencing it is the film’s catharsis. You can’t appreciate the good in your life unless you experience life’s pain, and David is especially in need of that confrontation. He arrives home, hopefully with a renewed sense of self and an appreciation for the good things in his life.

Benji, on the other hand, starts the film out way more in touch with who he is. His whole life is in pain, and that pain has broken him. He ends the film in the same place, both emotionally and physically, that he starts it. It’s an incredible bookend, to be honest. While it gives the film a melancholy ending, it’s what gives the film that raw realism that makes the pain real in A Real Pain.

The plot has some very powerful moments as the cousins join a tour group touring the places where some of the most notorious Nazi atrocities occurred during World War II. Benji, disturbed by the idea of this holocaust tourism, calls it out, which causes a lot of discomfort for David and the other people on the tour, but his raw emotion speaks to the other tourists. Despite David’s attempts at appeasement and his opening up as much as he can to them, they all seem to love Benji more in the end, or at least they all have deeper emotional connections to him. Their farewell to the tour group is a telling sign of how cathartically revealing pain can be and how damaging it can be to hold that pain inside.

There is a lot going on under the surface in this screenplay. Eisenberg showed his true talent as a screenwriter, and this is a script that screenwriters should reference when attempting to write compelling subtext. A Real Pain is one of those movies you really need to reflect on, and it might even require multiple viewings to get the full breadth of what it’s trying to say.

I hope it gets more love at the Oscars than it did at the Golden Globes. No one plays broken characters like Kieran Culkin, and his GG was well-deserved, and he’s certain to be, at the very least, nominated for an Oscar. But Eisenberg deserves recognition for the masterful screenplay he wrote and for his subtle direction that produced one of the most powerful movies of the year.