A balancing act that seems to enjoy feeling as if it’s about to lose its balance, “The Friend” is a lot of different things at once. It’s a dog-and-human bonding movie, which means it’s unavoidably sentimental. It’s a Bill Murray movie, which means it’s funny in a snarky way, but it’s also a character drama in which Murray is an unseen presence most of the time. It’s a movie about grief and a movie about creativity.
And mostly, the new film from writer-directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee (“Montana Story,” “What Maisie Knew”) is all of those things at once, sliding between tones, defaulting to lightness most of the time but always ready to veer in another direction.