I See What He Did There

WHILE WE'RE YOUNG (B+) - I know what Noah Baumbach was going for here, and it's admirable. If he had pulled it off, he would have crafted a masterpiece. As it is, this battle of generations -- X vs. Millennials -- is smartly written and well acted.

But Baumbach's past films from the last decade really stick with you -- "Frances Ha," "Greenberg," "Margot at the Wedding," "The Squid and the Whale." This one seems ambitious but fizzier and fuzzier. It's funny but just a tad scattered.

Ben Stiller is wonderful as Josh, a 40-something documentarian obsessing over his own egg-head masterpiece (years in the making and still not nearly finished) and toiling in the shadow of his mentor/father-in-law, Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin), a legend in the field (known for such Mayslesian works as "Boy in the Bathtub"). Josh and his vivacious wife, Cornelia (Naomi Watts, back in form), live a happy child-free existence in a clean, well-lighted section of Brooklyn.

Josh soon is befriended by up-and-coming filmmaker Jamie (Adam Driver, starting to wear his shtick thin already), a hipster in a fedora whose wispy wife Darby (a spot-on Amanda Seyfriend) makes ice cream in a loft they share with a random roommate, Tipper (Dree Hemingway). Jamie and Darby seem to have furnished their loft with everything the older couple tossed out in the early '90s. They play vinyl albums and earnestly shun other modern conveniences. The ones who obsess over their phones -- you may have noticed this -- are the older Gen Xers. Here that's Josh and Cornelia's friends Fletcher and Marina (Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz and Maria Dizzia), sadly convinced that they are only following new social norms with that classic ironic detachment.

So Josh feels like a kid again. He and Cornelia start hanging out with Jamie and Darby and shunning Fletcher and Marina and their drag of a newborn. Josh, decked out in fashions borrowed from a Hipster Bingo card (fedora, hoodie, etc.), feels re-energized about finishing his opus, and Jamie has a line on his own project, inviting Josh to participate. But something's not right; Jamie seems to be working an angle. Ah, here comes the generational divide; these kids with their reality shows and YouTube don't follow the same rules we've surrendered to!

Baumbach is nimble with his narrative here. He throws in a few twists that Stiller pulls off impressively.  Baumbach has got more on his mind than bashing Gen Y. Or Gen X. Or popular culture in general. He has a Big Idea. (What is authentic? Which truths are worth pursuing?) You can see him mapping it out with postcards on a bulletin board and some thick philosophy books stacked on his desk. He just doesn't quite pull it off. It's a two-dimensional rendering of a three-dimensional brainstorm. At times it's quite funny, and the jokes are never cheap. A few sight gags (a chicken as a house pet; a cut to Josh in his new horn-rims) land perfectly. An extended sequence at a drug party, however, drags during a key section.

Thankfully, Stiller is strong, playing a more successful (though still stunted) version of his "Greenberg" man-child. Watts and Seyfried take a back seat to the men here, but they manage to give depth to their characters. Driver tosses in physical tics (Jamie does a Gleason-like flourish just getting out of a chair) but whereas he was refreshing in "Frances Ha," here he seems to be trying too hard to make Jamie quirky and mysterious. The glue holding the movie together is Grodin, the referee between the generations. Breitbart oozes the familiar father-in-law disdain toward Josh, and he seems genuinely charmed by Jamie despite the phoniness.

That wise, open-minded elder is Baumbach's ace up his sleeve. It's a reminder that he had a great, complex movie right at his fingertips. Just because he came up a little short doesn't mean that he failed. Like Mozart (and Josh), he just couldn't convey to the rest of us precisely what he had in his head.

BONUS TRACK
When Jamie plays Josh Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" to pump him up for a meeting with a potential financial backer, Josh notes that back in the '80s "I remember when this song was just considered bad." Baumbach pays it backward to the boomers by including a little cheesy McCartney on the soundtrack: