The Skeleton Twins movie review (2014)

It’s one of many examples of how Johnson and co-writer Mark Heyman take clichéd notions, upend them, breathe fresh life into them and make them feel excitingly new. That Starship song comes in the form of a spirited lip-sync between Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, who co-star as estranged twins fumbling to reconnect. They also get high together–a classic shorthand for breaking the ice and bonding in films–and they dress up in drag for Halloween.

We’ve seen countless uses of these devices and too often they seem wacky, forced and flat. In “The Skeleton Twins,” an off-kilter sense of humor, as well as a pervasive feeling of loneliness and regret, provides a more complex and far more human vibe.

Wiig and Hader co-star as Maggie and Milo, twins who live across the country from each other and haven’t spoken in a decade. She stayed in their hometown of Nyack, N.Y., got married and became a dental hygienist; he moved to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming an actor but instead works as a waiter. Their father committed suicide when they were 14. Their mother (Joanna Gleason in a brief but amusingly zany appearance) is a selfish self-help guru.

But despite the time and distance that have divided them, they’re still eerily in sync, and on the brink of self-destruction. The only thing that stops Maggie from swallowing a handful of pills at the film’s start is the phone call from a hospital informing her that Milo has just tried to kill himself.

She flies to L.A. and offers to bring him home with her, hoping that this will provide him with some stability. But obviously, she’s in need of some herself. “The Skeleton Twins” follows the process as Milo and Maggie learn to restore themselves by returning to each other. Again, it probably sounds very familiar–like “You Can Count on Me,” with an even more twisted sense of humor. But there are obstacles and twists on the road to recovery–and lies, and secrets, and baggage.

Maggie appears to be happily married to Lance (Luke Wilson), an overly eager and earnest nature lover who never quite gets the siblings’ jokes (which makes them even funnier). Wilson finds the tricky balance of playing an ebullient and optimistic type without overplaying it, and the filmmakers were smart to portray him as an abidingly decent dude when it would have been safer to make him a joke or a jerk.