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Noah Baumbach ’s latest film, “While We’re Young,” begins with the image of an adorable infant with a sweetly tinkling lullaby version of David Bowie ’s “Golden Years” playing in the background. It’s a contrast that perfectly encapsulates the film’s push-pull between the wisdom of age and the optimism of youth, as well as the balance it strikes between zesty ambition and quiet resignation.

Baumbach’s lead characters—a longtime husband and wife played with a natural, lived-in chemistry by Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts —are so vocal about how content they are as childless New Yorkers in their mid-40s that it’s clear they’re protesting too much. And yet, when they strike up an unlikely friendship with a spirited couple in their mid-20s, they can’t help but get sucked into their energetic vortex. As writer and director, Baumbach allows us to enjoy the silliness of the older couple’s newfound lust for life, whether it manifests itself in a trendy fedora or a hip-hop dance class. But since he’s the same age as Stiller and Watts’ characters, he’s also decent to them in their awkward fumblings. He is them, and they are us.

At the same time, he offers a biting yet affectionate skewering of Brooklyn hipster culture through the characters of Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried , both for its ridiculousness and ubiquity as well as for the way it makes the rest of us feel impossibly old. The details are delightfully dead-on. These are people who make artisanal ice cream, ride bicycles everywhere, play board games and only listen to music on vinyl. (That golden oldie “All Night Long” by Lionel Richie is among their favorites.) But there’s a catch: While Driver and Seyfried and their friends are actively retro, they also possess a generational entitlement—an expectation that they should have whatever they want, and have it now, without having to work too hard to get it.

Stiller’s Josh, by comparison, has worked way too hard over the past decade on a dense and overlong documentary about intellectualism and power and some such; I won’t even bother trying to explain it to you because watching Josh try to explain it is amusing enough. His wife, Cornelia, is a smart and seasoned producer whose father (an underused Charles Grodin ) is a pioneer of the genre along the lines of a Maysles or a Pennebaker. Josh yearns for such greatness and esteem, but it has eluded him. The character is a perfect fit for Stiller’s patented mix of restlessness and self-deprecation; more so than the one he played in Baumbach’s more dramatic “ Greenberg .”

Yet Josh feels rejuvenated when Driver’s character, the wide-eyed and warmhearted Jamie, shows up to audit the college class he teaches and fawns all over him. An aspiring documentarian himself, he quickly becomes Josh’s new BFF; meanwhile, Jamie’s wife and constant companion, Seyfried’s foul-mouthed Darby, befriends Cornelia and impresses her with an effortless cool. Through zippy and well-crafted use of montage and production design, Baumbach beautifully reveals the contrasts in these two couples’ lives.

There are traces of Woody Allen at work here as “While We’re Young” vividly makes fun of a specific subculture of hyper-articulate New York denizen, as well as the way its characters try to stave off the malaise of aging by clinging to characters who radiate the exotic promise of youth. But it also takes a clear-eyed look at the narcissism that can result from settling into a smug life of parenthood and domesticity, as evidenced by Josh and Cornelia’s former BFFs, played sharply by Maria Dizzia and Adam Horovitz . (Better known as Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys, Horovitz is great in this—a total natural and a surprising source of a calm and stability in a film full of flux.)

But “While We’re Young” takes a turn in the third act as it grapples with some ethical dilemmas, and it doesn’t quite work. It becomes angrier and heavier as Josh uses his inquisitive nature to unearth some dark truths—both about himself and his new friends. It feels like a totally different movie as it reaches its very public climax, and an inferior one.

Many Baumbach movies feature brilliant but immature people doing terrible things to each other (“ The Squid and the Whale ”, “ Margot at the Wedding ”) and “While We’re Young” is no exception. The observant and mocking humor that makes the film’s first two-thirds so breezy and enjoyable gives way to shattering realizations, but Baumbach ultimately tempers that instinct somewhat by exhibiting genuine sympathy for Stiller’s character.

“While We’re Young” searches for the blurry line we all cross once we’ve entered middle age, finds it and tramples all over it, but it does so with kindness for those of us who’ve made that inevitable journey and survived with some dignity intact.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

While We're Young (2015)

Rated R for language

Ben Stiller as Josh

Adam Driver as Jamie

Amanda Seyfried as Darby

Naomi Watts as Cornelia

Brady Corbet as Ken

Noah Baumbach

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While We're Young Reviews

Noah Baumbach makes While We're Young an expression of contemporary city life... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 17, 2024

A plethora of likable characters and tidy wrap-ups diminish the artistic potential of While We’re Young, as Baumbach doesn’t compromise the film’s abilities as a general crowdpleaser.

Full Review | Aug 3, 2023

“While We’re Young” gives its audience things to ponder and to chew on while also being deftly funny and unflinchingly human. It just can’t quite see its strengths through till the end.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

If "While We're Young" kept with that and stayed about the couples and their shared situations, the film would be much more, and rightly, transcendent as a fresh romantic comedy and thought-provoking entertainment entry.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 26, 2022

Baumbach's poignant dialogue and wry examination of people cannot help but inspire us to consider our own relationships, friendships, and attitude toward the world—no matter how commercial or audience-friendly it may become.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 21, 2022

An exhaustive and acid analysis on accepting the passage of time and leaving youth behind. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Apr 17, 2020

It starts off as a familiar comedy of postmodern manners before opening up and embracing a wider world. Cheer up, it says to Gen X. Everybody's in the same boat. Get over yourselves.

Full Review | Jan 9, 2020

While We're Young stumbles in pacing but contains a few sentimental moments and laughs that a mature crowd will enjoy.

Full Review | Original Score: 6.9/10 | Nov 13, 2019

It's rambling, tonally indecisive and contains no one as charming as Frances Ha, but this well-meaning spiritual sequel shines for its wry humour.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 10, 2019

A mostly breezy movie that's mostly very enjoyable and would have been great save for the uneven drama that emerges near the end making the film more of a downer than it needed to be.

Full Review | Original Score: 6.5/10 | Mar 14, 2019

Features a great cast with a great idea, but an idea that is never fully realized. It's a pay off not worthy of the film's very good opening half.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jan 23, 2019

A Poignant Comedy Made For Adults

Full Review | Original Score: B | Dec 8, 2018

If, in truth, the actual narrative never truly breaks free from Baumbach's conceptual concerns, it's still a really interesting watch just because those ideas are so prescient

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 3, 2018

While We're Young is wickedly on the nose in its depiction of men so self-obsessed they can't see who they really are - or who their friends are.

Full Review | Aug 28, 2018

Has one of the smartest scripts you will see delivered this year. It's also arguably Baumbach's most mainstream movie to date.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2018

Baumbach is too subtle to offer simple moral lessons. Instead he pushes us to see that there's more going on here.

Full Review | Aug 21, 2018

Filmmaker Noah Baumbach has infused much of While We're Young with a loose, freewheeling quality that's impossible to resist...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 30, 2018

While We're Young has the golden feel of a lifetime's obsession, the sense that Baumbach has spent so long observing the ghastliness of hipsters in Brooklyn that he now simply has to get it all down in one long, dramatic evacuation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 15, 2018

Baumbach's intelligence and uniqueness are evident in While We're Young. On the whole, though, the movie seems like it got lost on its search for some creative and human truth.

Full Review | Jan 12, 2018

As a non-breeder, I admit to being pleased to find a rare film that dares to stand up for the idea that your life is valid even without children.

Full Review | Oct 12, 2017

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While we're young.

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Common Sense Media Review

Witty, observant, salty comedy about work, love, babies.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 16+?

Frequent but not constant strong language, including "s--t," "a--

Some social drinking at parties. One character swigs heavily from a bottle of bo

Apple laptops, iPhones, and iPads.

Some yelling, screaming, and verbal confrontations. Talk of a soldier killing pe

Some kissing, sometimes extramaritally.

Any Positive Content?

Everyone is a work in progress, and if you don't explore what that means, yo

Josh and Cornelia are kind to each other and generally mindful of each other&#39

Frequent but not constant strong language, including "s--t," "a--hole," "f--k," and the like.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Some social drinking at parties. One character swigs heavily from a bottle of bourbon. In an extended sequence, people participate in a ritual involving a strong psychedelic drug.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Violence & scariness.

Some yelling, screaming, and verbal confrontations. Talk of a soldier killing people in Afghanistan and being scarred by the experience.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Everyone is a work in progress, and if you don't explore what that means, you might not grow. Themes include identity crises and professional uncertainty.

Positive Role Models

Josh and Cornelia are kind to each other and generally mindful of each other's feelings. They're also willing to explore how they fail each other -- and themselves.

Parents need to know that Noah Baumbach 's While We're Young is a witty, quietly moving dramedy about growing up and growing old. It's likely to appeal more to older teens and adults than younger viewers, who aren't likely find its themes -- including identity crises, flirting outside your marriage, and the loss of your professional moorings -- particularly relatable. There's some kissing (including between married people and partners who aren't their spouses), a fair amount of swearing ("f--k," "s--t," and more), arguments/confrontations, some drinking, and an extended scene involving a psychedelic drug. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

Josh ( Ben Stiller ) and Cornelia ( Naomi Watts ) are Manhattan fortysomething professionals -- he's a documentarian who's been working on his second movie for nearly a decade, she's a producer for her iconic filmmaker father ( Charles Grodin ). They're comfortably ensconced in their marriage, but that well-worn idyll is disrupted when they meet Jamie ( Adam Driver ) and Darby ( Amanda Seyfried ), a twentysomething couple from Brooklyn who forces Josh and Cornelia to examine their complacency. Jamie wants to make a film, too, and does so with impressive speed and brashness; Darby makes artisanal ice cream and seems to pursue her interests, wherever they may take her. Josh and Cornelia feel stuck between the younger couple and their same-age friends, who've moved onto child-rearing, a task that they've yet to undertake ... and may never experience, not after so many years of exhausting, draining fertility treatments and miscarriages.

Is It Any Good?

The quiet genius of WHILE WE'RE YOUNG is how it works on so many different levels. At first, it seems to empathize with befuddled Gen X types who now find themselves on the other end of the generation gap, no longer the upstarts who befuddled those who came before. When did this happen? How did this happen? And do we really have arthritis and (gasp!) need reading glasses? But the film also appears to understand the boldness of youth, of Millennials who are finding the value in the objects and cultural touchstones that Gen X-ers have thrown away in their haste to make a name for themselves -- but who are also still rying to make their way in an increasingly intractable landscape. How do you get ahead? Who do you have to be to do so?

That the film is gifted with a superb cast is the icing on this artisanal cake: From Stiller, who's managed to occupy Josh in such a sympathetic and believable way, to Watts to the incomparable Grodin, who's woefully underused in movies today. (And casting former Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz as a new dad in his 40s giving into his fatherhood with grace and humor is brilliant.) While We're Young hits few false notes. The animosity between Josh and his father-in-law is a little overdone, but the movie is a treat ... and a reality check.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what While We're Young is saying about what it means to be an adult. Is growing older the same thing as growing up?

What is the film's take on parenthood? On work? Do the characters and their issues feel relatable? Believable?

Parents, talk to your kids about the way Darby and Jamie are portrayed here. Is the movie fair to twentysomethings? Is there a generation gap?

Movie Details

In theaters : March 27, 2015
On DVD or streaming : June 30, 2015
Cast : Ben Stiller , Naomi Watts , Adam Driver , Amanda Seyfried
Director : Noah Baumbach
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : A24
Genre : Comedy
Run time : 97 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language
Last updated : November 2, 2022

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Movie Review: 'While We're Young'

Writer-director Noah Baumbach has made some of the most talked about indie films. He's back with: "While We're Young." Los Angeles Times and Morning Edition film critic Kenneth Turan says its one of his best.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

While We're Young (2014)

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While We’re Young Review

03 Apr 2015

While We’re Young

While We’re Young opens with a quote from Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder warning about the dangers of opening the door to youth. Don’t run away. Funny, fizzy but with brainfood to chew on Noah Baumbach’s seventh feature film as a writer-director is far more entertaining than any film prefaced by a Norwegian playwright has any right to be. Baumbach deftly mixes modern relationship insights with a more classical screwball sensibility and comes up with a smart, engaging, generous treatise on the battle to stay engaged and alive in middle age.

In outline, While We’re Young is the sum of Baumbach’s previous two films put together. 2010’s Greenberg (with Stiller again) is a portrait of a middle-aged man heading into crisis. 2012’s Frances Ha concerns a slacker not quite sure what to do with her life. Here, Baumbach throws the two generations into the mix together and revels in the clash of energies, pop cultures and expectations. It has echoes of other relationship comedy-dramas — the two couples dynamic, documentary filmmaking sub-plot and Vivaldi on the soundtrack feel very Woody Allen — but Baumbach not only finds his own voice but hits a higher gag rate than Allen has in years.

Early doors, Baumbach sketches a marriage in stasis in swift, sharp strokes. Childless couple Josh and Cornelia Srebnick feel ill equipped to have kids — Josh would read his baby Stephen King’s The Tommy Knockers — and their plans are held hostage to the epic political documentary Josh has been toiling on for ten years. “It’s “a six-and-a-half-hour film that’s seven hours too long,” says his celebrated documentarian father-in-law played with tetchy delight by Charles Grodin. Things take an upturn when they run into young married couple Jamie (Driver) and Darby (Seyfried) after Josh’s lecture. He is an aspirant filmmaker. She makes ice cream. Losing his Girls edge, Driver is all gangly affability and infectious openness. Seyfried, while she is the most under-developed of the foursome, registers with a big eyed optimism. Together they are a dream. You’d be friends with these two, whatever your age.

This is where While We’re Young really takes off. Baumbauch sketches the generational gap in unexpected ways, the oldies using MacBooks, Netflix and playlists trying desperately to keep their fingers on the pulses, the hipsters kicking it old school with typewriters vinyl and steadfastly refuse Google in order to discover who directed The Goonies. Baumbach is generous to both sides but errs towards Josh and Cordelia. This is a film about being exhilarated by the passion and freshness of youth, if ultimately that energy and courage is both daunting and threatening.

For as Jamie’s documentary film starts to take off — his idea to connect with an old friend on Facebook and then talk to them in person is a neat parody of bullshit non-fiction formats — Josh’s petty resentments and jealousies begin to come to the fore. Baumbach has been good for Stiller. Josh may not have the neurotic self-absorption of Roger Greenberg but he feels more real and affecting here than in Stiller’s mainstream work. It is to his credit that the higher the moral ground Josh takes, the more obnoxious he becomes yet you are still on side. He also achieves a nice easy-going chemistry with Watts who is on better, more relatable form here than she’s been for ages.

How this all develops takes plot twists and turns that are unusual in Baumbach’s work. Not all of it comes off. A set piece that sees Josh and Cordelia go on a hippie retreat and puke to the Love Theme From Blade Runner feels over the top and ill-judged. But for the most part Baumbach’s taste is in check. This may lack the beauty of Frances Ha but Baumbach wraps it in a bright attractive look with a soundtrack that runs from something for the fortysomethings (David Bowie) and something for the twentysomethings (Haim). And, of course, those prepared to blur the difference.

Movies | 27 02 2015

Trailer For Noah Baumbach's While We're Young

Movies | 04 12 2014

WHILE WE’RE YOUNG: A Borderline Crowd Pleaser

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No matter how good their circumstances are, many young people wish they were born in a different time, in a different place, belonging to a different generation they believe they fit in with more. This is almost definitely due to the influence of pop-culture; the 80’s weren’t exactly the best time to live in, yet show a John Hughes movie to any impressionable teenager and they will almost definitely long to have lived in that time period.

While We’re Young , the best film to date from director Noah Baumbach , takes a unique look at this theme in the space of one of the best movie montages in recent memory – whereas the young, hipster types long to live in an area of vinyls, VHS tapes and typewriters, the ageing are trying to stay relevant to today, filling their lives with useless technology in order to stay relevant in an ever changing society. Few movies are as perfect in showing the duality of ageing generations simultaneously distrusting the young whilst wishing they were young again – and even fewer are as funny and insightful as this.

The movie works because it never becomes quirky

Josh and Cornelia ( Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts ) are a middle-aged couple stuck in a rut. They are the only pair in their friendship circle who don’t have a child to rejuvenate their marriage due to personal problems and any spark of creativity they once had has now gone. Josh has spent the last decade trying to make a documentary everybody deems boring and he can’t even summarise briefly – the funniest scene in the movie by a country mile is him pitching the movie to an uninterested investor. One of the films few flaws is that it never really explores Cornelia’s professional life, a shame as she is a fully realised character and by not doing so it feels like she is nothing more than the outdated trope of a stay-at-home housewife.

Both of them are given new leases of life by a chance meeting with Jamie and Darby (the ever brilliant Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried ) who attend one of Josh’s lectures. Jamie is a budding documentarian who cites Josh as an inspiration (he watched one of his documentaries via a VHS he bought on eBay) and Darby makes home made ice cream.

Concepts like “funny old people dancing” and “funny hats” are so ingrained in the pantheons of terrible comedy ideas that is quite bizarre to see them handled in a way that’s actually amusing. In the movie’s second half, the movie takes a bizarre turn into borderline conspiracy thriller territory (I won’t say any more), yet it doesn’t feel like a jarring shift in tone – if anything, it underlines the movie’s central theme about the distrust of millennials.

Is this a feel-good movie in disguise?

In all honesty, I haven’t previously been a fan of director Noah Baumbach , with the exception of his 2005 movie The Squid and the Whale . The reason I liked that movie and no others in his filmography is due to it actually feeling contemptuous of its central characters and the upper middle-class Brooklynite culture they represent. His previous two movies, Greenberg (a rare non NYC-set Baumbach effort) and Frances Ha , were widely critically acclaimed, yet I didn’t like them due to it being sympathetic to characters who were fundamentally annoying and a tiny bit awful, with very little presented in the character development department. It felt like the characters around them were changing to adapt to their quirky personalities instead of the other way around.

While We’re Young feels like a correction of both of those movies, showing the effects that the care-free personalities of the hipster couple have on the responsible world around them (I would usually refrain from using the word “hipster”, but the movie does close with Jamie acknowledging he is one by stating that he “is of a certain age and wears tight jeans”). That it manages to do this whilst wholeheartedly embracing this culture is further proof that this may be Baumbach’s most empathetic movie to date, as well as his most purely enjoyable one.

While We’re Young manages to be a feel-good, frequently funny comedy without ignoring the shifting emotional complexities (or lack thereof) of the central characters. Even if it feels at times very specific to a culture many viewers won’t relate to, the performances of Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts help turn it into a borderline crowd-pleaser that manages to do the one thing hipsters are stereotyped as hating – turning their culture mainstream. Yet with Jamie’s fandom of Lionel Richie and desire to make a hit mainstream documentary, maybe they don’t want to be on the fringes of society anymore. While We’re Young similarly doesn’t deserve to remain on the fringes, as beneath the quirks and the emotional manipulation that dominate the movie’s second half, there is a warm heart beneath it that is always in clear view.

Have you seen While We’re Young ? Did you feel it was a feel good movie, or do you feel it had a mean streak in terms of it’s characterisation of the hipster characters?

While We’re Young is out now in the UK and US, all international release dates can be found here .

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Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young Is a Long Anticlimax

In While We’re Young , writer-director Noah Baumbach gets hold of a good satirical premise and does halfway well by it, maybe even two-thirds. His protagonists are sad 40-somethings Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), who can’t have kids and grow increasingly alienated from their child-centric friends, but who meet a pair of 20-something hipsters, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), and discover an exhilarating new design for living. Josh and Cornelia are dimly aware — especially at first — of how ridiculous they look trailing breathlessly behind flaky kids 20 years their junior. But they’re invigorated by the company and elated by the sudden sense of what’s possible. For much of the film, the often-bilious Baumbach stakes his claim on the wobbly-but-fertile border between mockery and sympathy. He seems to have found his inner Paul Mazursky, the satirist who can poke fun at his characters’ foolish self-delusions without delivering the killing blow.

He has certainly found his perfect fool in Stiller, an actor for whom unease, shame, and paranoia seem second nature. That made him too on the nose as Baumbach’s malcontent Greenberg and too much of a stretch as a lovable little man with big dreams in his own The Secret Life of Walter Mitty . But Josh is in Stiller’s sweet spot; he’s just the right mix of hope and worry. As a filmmaker who has spent the last decade editing a political documentary about … something lefty, I never understood the premise, Josh is both righteous and indecisive; he can’t get into a groove because no groove can accommodate his zigs and zags. He’s a billboard for pained inertia.

Josh is flattered when Jamie — himself a filmmaker — pops up at one of his sparsely attended extension-school lectures and goes on to enthuse over an early, obscure doc of his, and more flattered still when Jamie welcomes him into a world of bohemian adventurers with retro passions like vinyl records, board games, and shamanic circles. Josh is even flattered when Jamie begins calling him “Yosh,” which is where any self-respecting person would draw the line. We see the appeal: Jamie is like a younger, stretched-out Josh, still wide-eyed, still in Eden before the advent of shame. Though Cornelia doesn’t have her husband’s back-to-the-garden vision, she’s equally desperate for refuge, her spirit broken by contemporaries who coo over infants and gaze on her with a peculiar mixture of pity and resentment.

While We’re Young has an agreeable hubbub, like Woody Allen’s recent talk-fests but looser and less thesis-driven. The movie shows off Baumbach’s often marvelous ear for the self-congratulatory language of closed ecosystems, the banter that makes insiders feel special while inducing existential panic in typical Baumbach protagonists, who can’t seem to pick up the code. Josh and Cornelia are so desperate to enter Jamie and Darby’s world that they forsake a country weekend with grown-ups for a druggy vision quest (“Breathe in light, breathe out darkness”) in which participants struggle to express deep thoughts, vomit into buckets held chest-high, and calmly resume speaking, unfazed by the high ratio of puke to insight. It’s obvious that Josh and Cornelia will never fit in, but we love them for trying. And we love Jamie and Darby, too, for opening up their world — and offering to collaborate on a documentary — with no ulterior motive.

Until, that is, an ulterior motive presents itself, and the familiar chip on Baumbach’s shoulder reasserts itself with a vengeance. (Or was it always there, under wraps?) Maybe the movie’s pretentious opening should have been a tip-off: a snatch of dialogue from Ibsen’s The Master Builder, in which 20-something Hilda Wangel exhorts the aging title character, Halvard Solness, not to fear the knock of youth on the door but to “open it and let them in.” If you don’t know the play, Hilda is the embodiment of youth who urges the master builder to climb to the top of a steeple and becomes semi-orgasmic as he plummets to his death. Nobody dies in While We’re Young, but a lot of illusions are bashed against the pavement. As the melodrama kicks in and Josh begins to rail about documentary ethics, we’re suddenly in a universe of liars, opportunists, and people who want what’s ours. Only the motives of Baumbach’s alter ego are pure. Meanwhile, the most entertaining questions — Can people transcend wide age gaps? Should they want to? — turn out to be beside the point.

Though Stiller and Driver are better in the first half, the four leads remain excellent; Maria Dizzia and Adam Horovitz (as Josh and Cornelia’s baby-bound best friends) have their moments; and there’s a funny scene in which Josh pitches his unending documentary to a hedge-fund manager who doesn’t so much say no as slowly withdraw into the ether, unable to recognize that what’s coming out of Josh’s mouth are words. But the movie is a long anticlimax. The biggest disappointment is the role that Baumbach wrote for Charles Grodin — his juiciest in many years but with only one or two laugh lines. If nothing else, I wanted Grodin to kick Stiller’s butt across the screen for desecrating the name of The Heartbreak Kid.

*This article appears in the March 23, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.

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While We’re Young

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Comedy really is hard. So it’s a kick when a filmmaker gets it right, as Noah Baumbach does in this stingingly funny take on aging. While We’re Young, which finds humor in the broken places, reunites Baumbach with his Greenberg star Ben Stiller . Stiller’s Josh Srebnick isn’t the total asshole this time . But Josh is just as neurotic. He’s a documentarian who’s been fiddling for a decade on his latest work. His wife, Cornelia ( Naomi Watts ), inadvertently put Josh in the shadow of docu master Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin). He’s her dad.

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But the real threat in the mind of fortysomething Josh is youth, expressed in a quote from Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder that opens the film. Josh and Cornelia feel alienated from their age-appropriate, kid-focused BFFs, played by Maria Dizzia and Adam Horovitz. Cornelia and Josh have adjusted to being childless.

What to do? Fraternize with twentysomethings in the persons of Jamie ( Girls ‘ Adam Driver), a wanna-be filmmaker who kisses Josh’s ass at every opportunity, and his wife, Darby (Amanda Seyfried), who takes Cornelia to hip-hop dance classes. Baumbach scores many a caustic laugh at the expense of watching Josh and Cornelia try to recapture their youth. But compassion also seeps through the cracks. Stiller is killer at blending wit with physical comedy. His scenes with the gifted Driver, playing a careerist in hipster’s clothing, escalate into generational comic warfare of a high order. Though Baumbach lets his themes run off course as the film progresses, he sure as hell touches a raw nerve.

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Young at heart.

There’s a shot near the end of Noah Baumbach’s new movie that would not only be the perfect ending for the movie, but it would also be the Noah Baumbach ending. Then the following dreaded words appear on screen:

ONE YEAR LATER

Baumbach has not traditionally been a filmmaker concerned with epilogues. His films may have moved in recent years toward more definitive conclusions, but they have never sought to put on the kind of fine point implied by the words “ONE YEAR LATER.” This is just one example of how While We’re Young might be Baumbach’s most accessible film to date, but also the one that feels the least like him.

The subject matter itself is all Baumbach. While We’re Young concerns Josh and Cornelia ( Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts ), a documentarian and his wife who are facing their mid-40s. They’re childless but generally happy, if in a bit of a rut. As their best friends become their latest friends to have a baby, they’re feeling more and more alienated from their peers. It’s at this moment that two mid-20s Brooklyn hipsters drop into their lives while auditing the class Josh is teaching. Jamie ( Adam Driver ) is an aspiring documentarian himself, a fan of Josh’s work, while his better half, Darby ( Amanda Seyfried ), has started a business making ice cream. The couples have dinner one night after class, and the older sees in the younger the freewheeling lifestyle that they used to have. Jamie and Darby are all about authentic experiences, immersed in a post-Facebook rejection of new technology, while Josh and Cornelia feel themselves imprisoned by devices and further removed from the selves they want to be. As they grow friendlier with the young couple, changing their wardrobe and going to hip hop dance workouts, they also find themselves in a demographic no-man’s land. Josh is drifting even further from completing the film he’s been working on for a decade, and they both question whether not having kids was the right choice.

The increased conventionality of While We’re Young is on display from the beginning, but it starts out as a positive. Perhaps because of the presence of Stiller, who collaborated with Baumbach on a more offbeat character study in 2010’s Greenberg , While We’re Young has the rhythms of a mainstream comedy, albeit within the wonderfully realized Brooklyn we saw in Baumbach’s Frances Ha . The benign ennui of Josh and Cornelia and the thrift-store eccentricity of Jamie and Darby are both captured with insightful precision and contagious fun, and the clashes are structured toward a series of satisfying payoffs. One particular montage shows the older couple involved in all sorts of button pushing and finger swiping, while the younger one bangs out sentences on ancient typewriters and smokes cigarettes while playing Risk. We think of the young as masters of social media and their elders as curmudgeons who don’t know Twitter from Instagram, but the hipster fetish for vinyl and DIY has turned such conventional thinking on its head. While We’re Young knows this, and in its first half, it milks the ironies for all their worth, replete with delectable examples of Baumbach’s smart ear for dialogue.

It’s during the second half that this movie starts to feel like the work of someone who’s getting a bit out of touch himself. Some of Baumbach’s decisions actually reek of studio meddling, though the writer-director has usually been pretty free from such influences. The direction he takes these couples’ relationship is not in itself bad, but the execution is pedestrian. There are times when While We’re Young exhibits the traits of a suspense thriller, including that hackneyed device where a character stumbles across a revelation by mentally processing a montage of telling moments from earlier in the film. One climactic confrontation feels straight out of Hollywood, including inappropriately ominous music and on-the-nose thematic cross-cutting.

The problem seems to be that Baumbach has bitten off more than he can chew. Merely exploring a ripe social phenomenon – a square older couple navigates the awkwardness of becoming friends with a cool younger couple – would have been plenty for a film like this. Baumbach’s mistake is to tackle the authenticity issue, which expresses itself through the differing approaches to filmmaking taken by Josh and Jamie. Josh’s methodology is pure, rigorous and all encompassing, while Jamie’s is expedient, focused and results driven. Although he’s alternately critical of both, Baumbach seems to support Josh’s tendency to overstuff his work – in part because the same type of excess ambition is on display in While We’re Young . Generously, that could be read as a clever bit of meta, but it seems more like Baumbach is myopic about the ways the main character resembles himself. When Baumbach ends up damning the younger generation, dismissing them as a bunch of thieves and repurposers, it does feel like the insights of an old guy who has recently bought a fedora, and then been told he couldn’t pull it off.

And yet, this is Noah Baumbach we’re talking about. Even when his movies don’t totally work – and people have varying degrees of affection for films like Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg – they contain such a marvellous collection of wisdom about human beings and their foibles that they are always worth the effort. This one just needed to feel a bit more effortless.

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While We're Young (United States, 2014)

While We're Young offers two movies for the price of one. The first, about a married couple in their 40s coping with being rootless and middle-aged while lamenting the loss of their youth, is smartly-observed and relatable. The second, about dueling documentary filmmakers struggling over the meaning of truth in their medium, is dull and distancing. Writer/director Noah Baumbach tries with limited success to wed the two but the result reflects the split personality of the narrative components and leaves the audience more puzzled than satisfied.

Wisdom may come with age but it's accompanied by a powerful sense of denial. Few men and women in their 40s or 50s are completely comfortable with their age. The term "mid-life crisis" was coined to encapsulate the inability of older people to leave behind the trappings of their younger selves. As a character notes in While We're Young , a person's chronological age may be 40-something but the mind still thinks like that of a teenager not fully prepared to face the world. Parents are sometimes overwhelmed by the experience of having children because, on some level, they think of themselves as children. Most viewers will be able to relate to this; it's a universal theme. While We're Young certainly isn't the first (or best) movie to address this and it won't be the last. When Baumbach mines this ore, he has found a rich vein. His screenplay is replete with witty asides and amusing anecdotes. There are echoes of Woody Allen. Unfortunately, the movie goes off track when it starts investigating the importance of truth and integrity in documentaries - topics about which Baumbach fails to provide sufficient motivation for anyone outside the filmmaking community to care about. We have to grind our way through scenes of Ben Stiller, Charles Grodin, and Adam Driver discussing their views before getting back to material that works on a human level.

In addressing the issue of how individuals and couples change with age, Baumbach does some interesting things. He contrasts the 20-something couple (Jamie and Darby) with the 40-something couple (Josh and Cordelia) but with an intriguing role-reversal. Josh and Cordelia are shown as having a strong affinity for electronic devices and new technologies (cell phones, tablets, watching Netflix on a flat screen TV) while Jamie and Darby surround themselves with old-school items: books and manual typewriters. The couples have little in common but are fascinated by each other and interested in "sampling." It's the "grass is always greener" syndrome. Baumbach is 45 (roughly the same age as Josh) so he writes from personal experience. He knows what these characters are feeling which is the reason why the human elements resonate with authenticity - a quality that fades when While We're Young wanders off on the tangent about what constitutes a legitimate documentary.

When it comes to the modern-day American independent movie scene, Baumbach offers one of the stronger voices. His movies often divide opinion among critics and viewers (some seeing him as pretentious while others find him to be refreshingly non-commercial) but While We're Young is arguably his most mainstream effort in a decade. The movie's pitfalls, however, prevent it from fully realizing its pregnant themes. While We're Young may provide the fusion of two disparate narrative packages but the glass is only half-full.

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While We’re Young Review

By Edward Douglas

6 out of 10

Ben Stiller as Josh Naomi Watts as Cornelia Adam Driver as Jamie Amanda Seyfried as Darby Maria Dizzia as Marina Adam Horovitz Charles Grodin as Leslie Brady Corbet as Kent Dree Hemingway as Tipper James Saito as Dr. Kruger Todd Rohal as Brian Duges Matthew Maher as Tim

Directed by Noah Baumbach

When documentary filmmaker Josh (Ben Stiller) meets young married couple Jamie and Darcy (Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried) in his class, he’s fascinated by their youthful energy, so he and his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) start hanging out with them, much to the concern of their more age-appropriate friends.

Analysis:

Noah Baumbach has gotten a lot more prolific in the past few years and maybe we can credit that to his mumblecore muse Greta Gerwig, who appeared in Baumbach’s Greenberg alongside Ben Stiller and has done two projects with him since then. While We’re Young seems like a good companion piece to Greenberg in that it allows Baumbach to use his shrewd sense of humor about social politics to tackle a diverse number of subjects including parenthood, aging and annoying Brooklyn hipsters.

The opening quoted conversation about opening the door to let young people in is a good preamble to this tale of two different generations trying to connect, which Baumbach uses to make a number of astute and clever observations about how different the older generation is from the current one.

What immediately bothered me about Baumbach’s latest is the way this younger generation is depicted. I myself tend to hang out with people who are nearly 20 years my junior, and if any of them acted as obnoxious or clueless as Adam Driver’s Jamie and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried), I wouldn’t want anything to do with them. As much as Jamie and Darby are meant to represent what’s going on with young people today, their desire to embrace vinyl and VHS over the the instant gratification of digitally downloading music and movies just doesn’t seem realistic either.

At this point, it will come as no surprise that Baumbach is once again working with unrepentantly flawed characters with Josh and Cornelia being extremely selfish, and the younger characters being equally pretentious and self-serving, even if they’re better at masking it. If one didn’t know better, one might think the 45-year-old filmmaker is snubbing his nose at the friends of his collaborator (and girlfriend) Greta Gerwig – Jamie and Darby could easily have come straight out of their previous movie Frances Ha . The two generations are able to find common ground the more time they spend together, but Josh’s mid-life crisis culminates when the foursome take drugs in order to discover themselves spiritually. It leads to a scene with a lot of vomiting and trippy philosophizing you might expect in a much dumber comedy, and it’s where the film’s seams start to show.

With Greenberg , Stiller proved himself to be an apt vessel to represent Baumbach’s wry humor, although his character here isn’t different enough from the title role in their previous movie together to show that either of them has grown since then. (As much as I personally loved The Secret Life of Walter Mitty , it wasn’t because Stiller ever offers much dynamic range with the roles he plays.) Watts is surprisingly good at doing comedy, particularly in the scenes where she’s trying to keep up with Darby by hip-hop dancing, one of the funnier visual gags in the movie.

Adam Driver is also perfectly cast as Jamie, because he’s so good at being funny and obnoxious at the same time, and you always end up liking him even when it’s obvious he’s using Josh for his own means. On the other hand, it feels like any actress could have played Darby and brought more to it than Seyfried, who creates a fairly bland character with few defining characteristics to set herself apart, especially when compared to Watts. Like I mentioned earlier, she never seems like someone who one might interested in spending any sort of time with, going by her minimal role in the story.

Where the movie really begins to falter is when Baumbach tries to create an actual plot around the simple premise. Josh has spent ten years working on a long-winded doc while ignoring the advice of his father-in-law Leslie, a hugely respected documentarian played by Charles Grodin. When Jamie enlists Josh to help him make a documentary about a former schoolmate (Brady Corbet), a troubled Afghanistan vet, it starts to cause friction in the prideful Josh, as well as affect his marriage. Their conflict leads to a ridiculous last act turn that pays a far-too-obvious homage to the end of The Graduate .

While the epilogue does get things back on track to the film’s original intentions, you’re left feeling as if Baumbach knew exactly what he wanted to convey but got sidetracked by the desire to create some sort of drama in order to challenge the funny character dynamics.

The Bottom Line:

Baumbach continues to be a better writer than he is a director, and while his snarky, often unlikeable characters and unrealistic situations tend to undermine his clever observations on life, While We’re Young is hurt more by its weak plot and resolution than anything else.

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Movie Review: While We’re Young (2014)

Howard Schumann
Movie Reviews
3 responses
--> April 10, 2015

“I’ve become so disturbed by younger people. They upset me so much that I’ve closed my doors” – Henrik Ibsen from “The Master Builder”

Now 44, childless, arthritic, and stuck in career limbo, Josh Svebnick (Ben Stiller, “ The Watch ”) has the good sense to realize that life is passing him by. Though Josh and his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts, “ St. Vincent ”) are okay with not having children (after several miscarriages), they feel disconnected from their friends who have kids. Set in Brooklyn, New York, While We’re Young , Noah Baumbach’s (“ Frances Ha ”) latest bittersweet comedy is less abrasive than his previous films, but far from being a tribute to the human condition. Though not as angry and unpleasant as Roger Greenberg in Baumbach’s 2010 film “ Greenberg ,” Ben Stiller’s Josh is hardly the picture of aliveness.

His self-esteem, shaky to begin with, takes a further hit when his filmmaker father-in-law, Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin, “The Humbling”), criticizes a six-and-a-half-hour documentary that he has been trying to finish for ten years. Breitbart tells him that it’s “a six-and-a-half-hour film that’s seven hours too long,” leaving Josh to complain that the only emotions he has left are “wistful and disdainful.” Josh and Cornelia, however, see in Jamie Massy (Adam Driver, “ Tracks ”) and his girlfriend Darby (Amanda Seyfried, “ Les Misérables “), a young couple that embodies the youthful energy that eludes them.

Josh’s relationship with Jamie begins promisingly. Feeling flattered by Jamie labeling everything he says as “beautiful,” Josh agrees to help him with the documentary he is making, a decision he comes to rue. Jamie seems to fit Baumbach’s picture of what “hipsterism” should look like. He uses a manual typewriter, collects vinyl records, rides his bike all over the city, disdains technology and social media, and talks in hipster lingo. To feel like one of the in-crowd, Josh wears a hat and rides a bike, while Cornelia does her part with dancing and exercising to rap music.

The hipster thing goes overboard, however, when Josh and Cornelia agree to take part in an Ayahuasca ceremony led by an alleged shaman. Baumbach’s view of these proceedings seems to be that vomiting is the most important part of the process. Needless to say, there is no hint as to what the experience may really be like beyond the media-driven “Me generation” stereotypes. Josh’s partnership with Jamie soon begins to show strains, when Josh learns that Jamie used his film subjects — father-in-law Breitbart and History Professor Ira Mandelstam (Peter Yarrow) for his own personal film project. Josh views this, not as simple ambition or opportunism but as an example of the moral bankruptcy of today’s youth.

At a Lincoln Center dinner honoring Breitbart, the film brings up the issue of how documentaries have manipulated the truth to enhance their entertainment value, but it goes off on a tangent that ultimately conveys contradictory messages and a contrived ending. Without doubt, While We’re Young is a very entertaining film. As in the typical Baumbach experience, there is an abundance of irritating characters, the requisite number of clever one-liners (some even funny), snippets of redundant baroque music, and extensive use of foul language.

Unfortunately, however, this time it does not add up to an experience that feels real. While we all deal with the loss of our youth differently, the film’s facile conflict between middle-age and youth is overly calculated and is not illuminated by the suggestion that energy and enthusiasm are a function of age rather than of taking responsibility for our life and using our power to transform it — at any moment in time.

Tagged: family , filmmaker , friends , marriage

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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'Movie Review: While We’re Young (2014)' have 3 comments

April 10, 2015 @ 8:43 pm http://thequickflickcritic.blogspot.com/

I may still see this. Appreciate the take, however. Your Star System is some weird “sh–” though, man. ;o}

April 18, 2015 @ 10:04 pm Howard Schumann

Three stars = average according to the chart. That’s how I saw it.

April 10, 2015 @ 9:21 pm Utah

Ooooooo lookie it’s Ben Stiller acting all angsty and stuff

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REVIEW: “While We’re Young”

Noah Baumbach has made a career out of making movies about unlikable or generally unhappy characters. Many of his walking human complexities exist in various stages of lethargy, denial, or dissatisfaction. But at the same time the characters he creates drip with humanity and they are fascinating to watch. Yet with all of that being said, I don’t always fully go for his movies.

“While We’re Young” is another of Baumbach’s mixed bags. It is a sincere and genuinely human comedy that connects due to its observational honesty and its willingness to address real emotional struggles. But like a few other Baumbach projects, it doesn’t fully see its promise through and the final act of the film wanders away from what makes the story initially so compelling.

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play Josh and Cornelia Schrebnick, a middle-aged couple living in New York City. Their past difficulties in having a baby are highlighted with the birth of their best friends’ daughter. Josh and Cornelia attempt to brush aside their feelings of disappointment and unfulfillment by focusing on the freedoms they have as a family of two. But even that is effected by the plain ol’ fact that they are just getting old.

Josh is a movie documentarian who has been stuck in the rut of an eight year film project that shows no signs of nearing completion. After teaching a continuing education class at a local college he is approached by young twenty something couple Jamie and Darby Massey (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried). The Massey’s invite Josh and Cornelia to dinner where we learn Jamie is an aspiring documentarian and a huge fan of Josh’s first film.

Josh and Cornelia grow infatuated with their new young hipster friends and their exaggerated retro styles. They feel young and energetic whenever they are around Jamie and Darby and they begin feeling a disconnect with their old friends. But is this simply a refuge from their insecurities about getting older, or is the old adage correct – you’re only as old as you feel?

For most of the film Baumbach explores that question through a number of smart and witty conversations and situations. We see the Schrebnick’s, particularly Josh, open up and embrace new things. He puts aside some of his closed-minded, exclusionist perspectives and sees creativity and life in general through a new lens. But at the same time Baumbach is shrewdly pointing a finger, not at Josh but at the Masseys; asking compelling questions about the younger generation.

Baumbach’s film works on so many levels but it also has its flaws. Stiller and Watts each convincingly play their individual parts. Yet there are moments where I couldn’t quite buy into them as a couple. There are also a few moments where the normal sharp wit gives way to the juvenile. For example, an Ayahuasca scene leads to a running vomit gag that never seems to end. I mean who doesn’t laugh at vomit, right? And the biggest problem is in the last act when the story loses its focus a bit and ventures off in a direction that simply wasn’t that interesting.

Baumbach is a unique filmmaker who tells unique stories. His tales rarely venture outside of his confined view of life, love, and relationships but that’s what provides his films with their own flavor. “While We’re Young” gives its audience things to ponder and to chew on while also being deftly funny and unflinchingly human. It just can’t quite see its strengths through till the end. It’s still a good film. Not “Frances Ha” good but hey…

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