My favourite film: Swingers

About two years ago I came home to the house I shared with my three best friends from school. We were drunk. We'd been drinking a lot. We needed orange squash and tea and a sofa (each). And telly. Swingers was on. We came in just as Mike (Jon Favreau) is calling Nikki (Brooke Langton) – a girl he's just met in the Dresden, one of the many kitsch LA bar-restaurants that Mike and his friends drink in. That Mike has Nikki's number at this point is a victory of sorts. He's heartbroken: six months into the aftermath of leaving a six-year relationship in New York to make it as a comedian on the west coast. He's bitter, self-pitying, certain he'll never feel any other way, and needs this phone call to go well to get him through more weeks of waiting for the ex and/or his agent to call.

The phone call goes like this, and as we watched I pulled my head round to watch the people I was watching Mike disintegrate with. I wondered if they were enjoying this excruciating moment as much I was. And I wondered if it had occurred to them – as it had to me – that if Mike had been sitting in a living room with his three best friends, then this flirtation with social suicide would never have happened. He would have never picked up the phone.

Swingers makes me thankful for my friends, because it's a film about men realising that without them all you have to get you through the worst of life is time. And time on your own stretches on forever.

Occasionally your friends will define you. And Mike – wiped blank by the break-up – lets himself be defined. He takes on the lexicon of his motor-mouthed, antagonistic best buddy Trent (Vince Vaughn); so women become "babies" or "beautiful babies", anything good is "money", and Trent is "Daddy" or "Big T" or "T-bone". It's all a bit grubby, a bit macho, but it's what Trent can give Mike to help him reassert himself. Favreau, who wrote the script and based Trent on Vaughn, allows his co-star to romp around Mike's misery. It's a star-making performance that was spotted by Steven Spielberg (then casting for The Lost World), slinging Vaughn into the big leagues. If Vaughn and Favreau look lean and hungry here, it's because they were. Swingers – written in two weeks and rehearsed in front of theatre audiences – was an attempt by the pair to show the casting directors that had rejected them for many, many roles that they were worthy of a seat at the table. This film took them there and they ate.

I haven't yet mentioned that Swingers is funny. This is deliberate, because there's so much in the film that can be ridiculed. It's set in LA during the 90s swing revival. Mike, Trent and co bump from bar to bar to bar in horrible sub-Goodfellas gangster outfits. They quiff their hair. They smoke cigars. They idolise Sinatra and Scorsese. They talk dismissively on occasion of "skanks" and "fags" and they bollock on endlessly about their nonexistent careers. (Back on the sofa I'm turning to see if the three friends recognise the parallel. One of them's falling asleep).

But it is funny. It's as quotable as Wayne's World or Clerks. ("This is the guy behind the guy behind the guy", "You're looking at your claws and your looking at your fangs and your thinking to yourself … I don't know how to kill the bunny"), but with more heart than both of them. It presents men in their 20s as Trent - brash, buffoonish, sexist and deluded. And we are like that. But it also presents us as Mike – shy and self-conscious and fully unsure of ourselves.

A certain type of man can come out of Swingers labelling himself "money", grab a "wingman" and prowl for "beautiful babies" and he'd be missing the point entirely. It wasn't about pulling. It wasn't about front. It was about a homosocial bond so strong (some might say suffocating, some have said sexual) that these friends had developed their own language. I respond to that. To the gang mentality that creates it and the support structure that's behind it. And the idea that when things go bad those same friends are there to take crap from you. To take it and keep taking it until you feel better.

We were all falling asleep. Mike was on screen saying something to Trent about how it was all so hard and Trent was barely listening, because a woman across the diner was giving him vibe in a really weird way. She was looking at him like she knew him a little bit. She was playing fun little baby games and knew his address. Or something. A friend snored. We switched the TV off. We fell asleep. Together.