The Skeleton Twins

City Paper grade: C

Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig spent seven seasons together on Saturday Night Live, so it’s not surprising that they can so deftly pull off a sense of sibling camaraderie. As twins Milo and Maggie, they alternately delight and enrage each other in the way only family can — with a life’s history of inside jokes and old wounds. Both are introduced in the midst of failed suicide attempts, which sets the mood for Craig Johnson’s morose dramedy, reuniting the estranged twins to rehash a laundry list of midlife dysfunctions that includes parental neglect, adultery and statutory rape. Johnson and the cast, including an uncharacteristically bubbly Luke Wilson as Maggie’s clueless nice-guy husband, leaven the downer material with humor, but like the stars’ old show, it too often takes aim at the right targets with weak ammunition. Johnson has no real insight into any of these issues, so he just shrugs them off with one argument and reconciliation after another, one of which ends in a lip-sync performance of Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” that’s virtually begging to go viral. The sarcastic quips are not only a defense mechanism for the characters, but also for the film itself, which determinedly keeps all of these neuroses at an indie-cool arm’s length and makes peripheral characters disappear as soon as their storylines get interesting.