The greatest generation gap
Noah Baumbach’s sensational satirical drama “While We’re Young” is, finally, a movie for grownups to run out and see. Let the young’uns see dystopian, future-set fluff. This movie is all about the way we live now.
Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts shine as Josh and Cornelia, New Yorkers in their 40s. With no children but lots of midlife listlessness, they’re stuck in a rut, feeling a loss of identity. Then Josh, a flailing Park Slope documentarian and part-time teacher, meets a couple sitting in on his continuing-ed class.
They’re Bushwick-dwelling Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), and they are Josh and Cornelia’s opposites — spontaneous and seemingly irresponsible. Jamie and Darby got married in an abandoned water tower. They have a bird and a funky female roommate.
Jamie also makes docs, but his offer to co-direct a project with Josh is a sneakier move than you’d expect from a laid-back hipster. As Josh and Cornelia ditch their friends with babies for friends who act like babies, Josh finds, to his surprise, some notable values within himself.
When Baumbach is on, he’s really on, and the brilliant “While We’re Young” contains the same self-lacerating humor as his “Greenberg,” “Margot at the Wedding” and “The Squid and the Whale.” There are crackling kernels of truth throughout this 95-minute gem. When his screenplay switches subtly to a reflection on the nature of truth — one generation thinks truth is what you want it to be, the other finds that abhorrent — it echoes Woody Allen’s masterpiece “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
“Young” is also funny, and not just in wry ways. There are laugh-out-loud moments (Josh is not the type to attend an impromptu “street beach” event in Bushwick) and moments that cut so close to the bone, the only response is to chortle.
That’s Stiller’s wheelhouse. When Josh announces that he thinks his only two modes are “wistful and disdainful,” it pegs Stiller’s angry-everyman persona. Watts, lovely and amazing, has scenes of slow enlightenment, including a priceless one in which she gradually grows aghast at a Mommy & Me music class.
Driver (“Girls”) uses his ironic croak of a voice and snake-like arms to perfectly unctuous effect (Jamie’s hands come together in fake-earnest prayer when he looks thankful). Charles Grodin has a droll cameo as Cornelia’s filmmakerlegend dad. Seyfried does a spoton depiction of a millennial’s self-absorption; her Darby walks blocks with Cornelia, talking at her, not to her, and never once looking her in the eye.
For a guy who puts so much of modern life in the crosshairs, Baumbach never once loses focus in “Young.” This is a movie that will never get old.
jneumaier@nydailynews.com