Every time I sit down to a Noah Baumbach film I think I’m going to hate it, but I never actually do. From the French New Wave idiosyncrasies of 2013’s Frances Ha to the growing pains of his semi-autobiographical breakthrough The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach always manages to stay just the right side of pretentious, creating lively hipster-filled worlds that amuse as much as they annoy.
Nowhere is this delicate balance more on display than in While We’re Young, a heartbreaking and cautiously funny swipe both at unwelcome middle age and the follies of youth. For Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), the childlessness of their forties has hit them somewhat unexpectedly. Suddenly the well-meant but overbearing concern of two friends who have recently become parents pushes them to look for new experiences beyond the confines of their middle-aged world (never has a baby music class filled them — or me — with such terror) and they start hanging out with two liberated twenty-somethings, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), who reignite their creative passions, encourage them to wear fedoras and invite them to pseudo-spiritual hallucinogenic gatherings.
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