A lodger who may not lodge in your mind

Good Posture (15) Verdict: Worth slouching for ★★★✩✩

NOVELISTS Zadie Smith and Martin Amis play themselves, with admirable plausibility, in this promising cinematic debut as a writer-director by British actress Dolly Wells, daughter of the late satirist John Wells. But then she’s hardly a newcomer, having written and starred in Doll & Em, an engaging TV comedy, which she created with close friend Emily Mortimer.

Mortimer stars in Good Posture as Julia Price, an acclaimed, reclusive British writer living in middle-class Brooklyn. But the film’s lead is Grace Van Patten, who sprang to notice last year in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories.

Actually, this is a very Baumbach sort of story, but at times it gurns and strains to be kookily charming in a way that his pictures don’t. Nonetheless, Van Patten is excellent as Lilian, a spoiled young woman without much direction, who winds up lodging with Julia and her American musician husband.

The feckless Lilian and the uptight Julia are at loggerheads from the start, with the latter leaving catty messages in her lodger’s journal. The film chronicles their evolving relationship, as well as Lilian’s relationships with the men in her life, including her self-centred father, shacked up with his French girlfriend in Paris.

Good Posture is funny in parts and drags in others. Despite the title, it contains little to make you sit up straight. But it’s worth seeing, and whether you do or not, look out for the beguiling Van Patten.

If not quite on the cusp of major stardom, she’s right on the edge.