Swingers - The Best Ever Bromance Movie?

How out-of-work actor Jon Favreau helped create a film that ought to be in every bloke’s movie wardrobe.

“I think the reason Swingers found an audience is because it’s pretty authentic,” says the film’s writer and lead actor Jon Favreau. “It’s a film about how I was living at the time I wrote it. That’s the way I dressed, that’s the music I listened to, that’s the career path I was on, that’s the success I had chasing women – it’s all up there on the screen.”

Now best known as the director of the hugely successful Iron Man, Jon Favreau was but a struggling actor when he decided to write about himself. “When you’re starting out in movies, it’s hard to find roles that are a good fit. Since I couldn’t find parts that were suitable for me, I thought I might as well write a script with me and my friends in mind”; said friends including the young Vince Vaughn, whom Favreau had befriended on the set of the American college sports movie Rudy.

Taking its title from a favourite LA hangout, Swingers is the tale of young actors chasing roles and women in the City of Angels. Our heroes include the shy, heart-broken Mike (Favreau), the charismatic motor-mouth Trent (Vaughan) and the laid-back, matter-of-fact Rob (Ron Livingston). In thrall to the Rat Pack fashions of the ’50s and ’60s, these aimless but affable men are on a ceaseless quest for the opposite sex, which is quite understandable what with them here being represented by Heather Graham and Friday Night Lights’ Brooke Langton.