While We’re Young: sweet and sour

Like a lot of writer-directors with a natural gift for comedy, Noah Baumbach has spent a lot of his filmmaking career trying not to be too funny. He’s a whiz with a one-liner, and he populates his films with characters who talk just past each other as they maintain a running commentary on everything they see and feel. But to balance the banter, Baumbach movies such as Greenberg, Margot at the Wedding, and The Squid and the Whale tend to focus on failures and sourpusses whose almost pathological unhappiness works against the gags.

What makes Baumbach’s new While We’re Young so refreshing — at least initially — is that it’s densely packed with jokes. It seems purpose-built to please a broad audience. Ben Stiller stars as a documentary filmmaker named Josh who has spent years working on an abstract piece about war and politics. When he and his wife, Cornelia (Naomi Watts), meet the young hipster couple Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried), they return to being the cool, fun, creative people they were in their 20s: trying artisanal foods and strange drugs, remaining open to new experiences. Much like Baumbach’s magnificent 2012 film, Frances Ha, While We’re Young partly celebrates the plucky spirit of New York’s rising generation.

That’s how the movie begins, anyway.

Baumbach didn’t co-write While We’re Young with his recent romantic and creative partner, Greta Gerwig (with whom he collaborated on Frances Ha and the equally sunny upcoming comedy Mistress America), which may explain the dispiriting mistrust of youth that creeps into the picture. As Josh goes from admiring Jamie’s “shoot and upload a film in a week” industriousness to questioning his new friend’s values, While We’re Young becomes oddly preachy about what’s wrong with the kids today. Making matters worse, Baumbach adds a contrived plot twist that feels like one too many concessions to the mainstream, as though he’s trying to filter one of his typically loose collections of vignettes and observations into a conventional narrative that makes an obvious point.

Still, even a streamlined (and intermittently mean) Baumbach movie is smarter and funnier than just about anything else in theaters. While We’re Young paints Jamie and Darby as alien and sinister, but it’s uncommonly wise about how Josh and Cornelia feel as childless professionals in their 40s, worried that they have no legacy and no remaining cultural currency. As Josh bounces between Jamie and an older stay-at-home-dad friend (charmingly played by Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz) and Cornelia tries to convince herself that she’s happy being a middle-aged woman with options, While We’re Young hits Baumbach’s unique comedic sweet spot between the cutting and the empathetic.

Ultimately, his film is about two well-meaning people coming to grips with who they are versus who they’ve always thought they were supposed to be. And when it’s on a roll, While We’re Young is hilarious, whether Baumbach is marveling at a generation that has turned The Goonies and Lionel Richie into pop treasures or poking fun at a befuddled older filmmaker who excuses his unfocused, inaccessible, decade-in-the-making documentary by saying it’s “about America.”