Screenplay: They Came Together

Overview
"They Came Together" is a fast, affectionate parody of modern romantic comedies that follows Joel, a corporate executive, and Molly, a small business owner, as they collide, fall in love, and then watch everything go cartoonishly wrong. The screenplay, shaped by David Wain's sharp, absurdist sensibility, intentionally leans into rom-com conventions, meet-cute, quirky best friends, misunderstandings, grand gestures, while lampooning and amplifying their predictability.
The film trades sincere sentiment for a satirical look at how formula and cliché shape romantic narratives. It replicates the beats of a typical sweetheart movie with such bluntness that every line and scene becomes a joke about itself, yet it retains enough genuine warmth to make viewers care about the characters even as the script gleefully mocks their choices.

Plot
Joel and Molly meet under improbably whimsical circumstances and quickly enter into an idealized relationship that mirrors the tidy progression of the genre: attraction, rapid intimacy, and the blissful suspension of real-world complications. Joel represents corporate conformity, working for a faceless conglomerate that prizes market share over heart, while Molly runs a small, independent candy shop that symbolizes artisanal passion and community roots. Their opposite careers and values provide the central friction.
As their romance deepens, career pressures, meddling exes, and escalating misunderstandings drive them apart in ways that are simultaneously exaggerated and all-too-familiar. The screenplay stacks obstacles deliberately absurd and oddly specific, faux-serious betrayals, cartoon villainy, and melodramatic reveals, turning each setback into a wink at the audience. Reconciliation arrives through a series of baroque rom-com rituals, but even the reunion is played with knowing irony.

Characters
Joel functions as the archetypal pragmatic romantic lead whose corporate identity masks a softer interior. Molly is the archetypal quirky heroine, rooted in small-business ethics and personalized charm, whose very name signals rom-com purity. Their chemistry is built on opposites and mutual bewilderment, and the screenplay mines that friction for both laughs and surprising tenderness.
Supporting roles exist to fulfill genre functions, skeptical friends, scheming love rivals, and officious authority figures, but they are stylized to the point of caricature. Each secondary character exists to trigger a specific trope: the jealous ex who reappears at the wrong moment, the best friend who offers blunt exposition, the boss who embodies corporate amorality. Their predictability is part of the joke, a mirror held up to the familiar mechanics of romantic storytelling.

Themes and Tone
The screenplay interrogates sincerity and artifice in romantic storytelling by performing both at once. It satirizes the commercialization of love, the fetishizing of "authentic" small businesses, and the way modern relationships are narrated through tidy cinematic structures. Beneath the parody, there is a small core of earnestness: two people who genuinely enjoy one another and must decide whether to choose a shared life over career-driven certainty.
Tone oscillates between affectionate and caustic, deploying deadpan delivery, meta-commentary, and escalating absurdity. Jokes often come from literalizing metaphors or pushing a trope to its logical extreme, producing laugh-until-it-hurts moments alongside quieter scenes that nod toward the genre's emotional beats. The result is both a critique of formula and a celebration of why those formulas endure.

Style and Structure
The screenplay is tightly organized around rom-com milestones but subverts expectations through timing, dialogue, and visual gags. Scenes compress classic sequences into hyperbolic versions of themselves, meet-cutes that arrive five different ways, montages that highlight cliché, and confrontations that end in comedic non sequiturs. This structural mimicry makes the parody precise and unmistakable.
Humor derives from contrast: sincere romantic language delivered in absurd circumstances, cinematic conventions exposed and then exploited for comedic payoff. The script's rhythm moves briskly, keeping the parody lively while allowing genuine character moments to slip through the satire, ensuring that the film lands as both a roast of the rom-com and, at its core, a strangely sweet love story.