Max & Ivan: Our Story

Ostensibly a true account of how the narrative sketch duo met, Our Story is gentler than Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez's more madcap recent hours, but still solidly entertaining and a decent showcase of their fraternal chemistry and comic acting talents. Jumping between the present and the past, purporting to tell the tale of Max's induction into wrestling school and Ivan's arrival at the scout camp next door, it's peopled with their usual mix of bizarre characters and damaged oddballs.

Both are struggling to find their identities and are tested by adversity, but bond over illicit meetings away from their respective tribes; their burgeoning friendship coloured by our knowledge that present-day Max is getting ready to ditch his partner and strike out solo in America. If that seems like a familiar conceit for the double-act dynamic, well it is. But Olesker and Gonzalez derive a certain amount of pathos from it in between returning to their past, where the callow Olesker faces his wrestling nemesis and the good-natured Gonzalez must help a pitiable friend overcome his feeble ineffectualness. Along the way, they disclose various jobs Ivan got them fired from and introduce his blandly improper aunt, creating inappropriate but oddly specific greeting cards for Hallmark.

For a Max & Ivan show, Our Story maintains an unusually tight focus on the central story and characters, preferring to routinely allude to rather than portray a renegade scout master for example. Amusing throughout, it doesn't quite capture their best work's knockabout levels of intense silliness.