Review: 'While We're Young'

[vc_row][vc_column width="2/3"][vc_column_text disable_pattern="true" align="left" margin_bottom="0"]Much as movies can't properly skewer social media without sounding like grandpa yelling to get off his lawn, they also haven't quite figured out how to disparage millennials. They see the value in disparaging them, that's for sure. It's the strategy element that hasn't been nailed down. Should they take broad strokes, focusing on smartphones and tight jeans and funny hats? Or maybe dig into their core and examine work ethic, integrity, a loose understanding of morals in an increasingly immoral world?

Noah Baumbach tries both in While We're Young, with little success. He is the auteur behind the alienating masterpiece The Squid and the Whale, the post-college dramedy Kicking and Screaming and the recently acclaimed (and similarly themed) Frances Ha. But now he's a 45-year-old man who's come of age, and he's got something to say about kids these days.

Ben Stiller stars as Josh, a documentary filmmaker who's spent almost a decade toiling away on his last project. He stumbles upon the adoring Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried) at a college lecture he's delivering, and spends the next hour falling in love with the creativity and generosity of his new friends. They collaborate incessantly and ride bikes and bury themselves in nostalgia…or so it seems. There's a seamy underbelly to it all, one that Josh becomes obsessed with exposing.

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