Middle-aged meets hipsterscott rudin productions

“We said our vows in an empty water tower in Harlem.”

While We’re Young is a film in which middle-aged meets hipster. A coming-of-age story for those post-forty, writer-director Noah Baumbach’s latest work (following on from Frances Ha, Greenberg, and The Squid and the Whale) features a documentarian, his wife and their chance meeting with a young married couple that inspires them to cling on to their youth.

Unsurprisingly full of snappy and quirky dialogue (Baumbach has frequently co-written with Wes Anderson), this film is reminiscent of Annie Hall and Manhattan, plunging artistic and intellectual characters into the absurdity of city life, with street beach parties galore.

Josh’s (Ben Stiller) life is in stagnation as he works on his magnum opus, a difficult to follow documentary crafted from hundreds of hours of interviews, described by his father-in-law and legendary documentarian as “a six-and-a-half hour film that’s seven hours too long.”  His childless marriage with Cornelia (Naomi Watts) is on the rocks. When Jamie (Adam Driver) speaks to Josh after attending one of his classes, they strike up a friendship resulting in the older couple ignoring friends their own age in order to hang out with the twenty-somethings.

Jamie and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried) are impossible to dislike – Jamie, an aspiring film maker, has a wall loaded with vinyls, and Darby makes artisan ice cream. Through watching their friendship develop, we are able to see the Netflix-using, iPhone-googling, laptop-writing Josh and Cornelia try to navigate a hipster world in which people watch VHS tapes, ride fixie bikes and type on typewriters. This clash of generations is evident in the soundtrack of the film; we hear David Bowie, contemporary remixes by edgy DJs and Antonio Vivaldi, an eclectic taste similar to Jamie’s vinyl collection, complemented by Josh.

The bond between two married couples is strengthened as Josh and Cornelia realise that all their friends their own age already have children. In a particularly comical scene, Cornelia runs out of a mother-and-baby dance class into one full of hip-hop dancers twenty years younger than her, able to exist but unable to fit in inside the two worlds she inhabits.

While We’re Young is a blessing for Stiller, allowing him to shine in a more serious role than those in which audiences are more accustomed to seeing him. He confidently plays an obnoxious man who is struggling to understand where he went wrong in a changing world in which he was supposed to be the next big thing.

As his young friend/protégé’s new catfish-style film begins to gather more steam than the documentary he’s been working on for close to a decade, Stiller impressively portrays a man taken over by jealousy and paranoia, and the beautifully filmed confrontation scene that follows is painfully gripping. Like Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Steve Carell in Foxcatcher, Stiller has been able to successfully make the leap from comedy to drama. For the benefit of cinema, hopefully Stiller will continue to collaborate with Baumbach.

The writing for the most part is snappy and witty, and this dialogue-driven film feels like it could have been produced in the 1970s. At a visit to the doctor Josh learns that he is ageing faster than he had anticipated. “Arthritis arthritis?” he asks. “I usually just say it once,” quips back the doctor.  Adam Driver impresses throughout the film, though he is particularly superb near the end, when his lines allow him to fully explore his character that previously seemed one-dimensional.

As good as most of the film was, the final act is a bit of a let-down. The ending (no spoilers!) is clichéd and predictable in an attempt to be heart-warming, though the character development of Josh is something to marvel at as this conceited and selfish man shows that he is both the most principled and naïve of those in the film.

Unfortunately, the female characters remain underdeveloped compared with their male counterparts. While Jamie is shown to be pulling the puppet strings of everyone he meets, impressively hiding his careerism, Darby’s role is limited to his quirky hip-hop dancing wife. More focus on how their marriage worked would have been appreciated. Although Cornelia shines in the couple of scenes in which she is the focus, we cannot escape that her primary character attribute is that she is the wife of her husband and the daughter of her father, who mentored Josh in his youth.

While We’re Young is an interesting take on what people do to stay young and the mistaken desire to accept that change is always a good thing. Hipsters are satirised, the dialogue is quick and Ben Stiller is sick in a bucket while discovering his hopes and dreams. What more could you want? The film dared to open with a quotation from a 19th century Norwegian playwright, but don’t let this fool you: this is one enjoyable movie. Baumbach’s latest work is punchy and emotive, and although it seems like a mediocre Woody Allen film at times, a mediocre Woody Allen film is still pretty damn good.