More Damsels in Distress

MISTRESS AMERICA (D+) - Thud.

We had deep reservations about this second 2015 offering from Noah Baumbach (this one with girlfriend Greta Gerwig). We've loved every one of his offerings since "The Squid and the Whale," but we feared that this tale of a free-spirited 30-something and an impressionable college gal would play more like Whit Stillman's tone-deaf "Damsels in Distress,"  which we memorably walked out of.

Our fears were realized.

Baumbach has consistently scored high grades here with "While We're Young," "Frances Ha" (with Gerwig), "Greenberg," and "Margot at the Wedding." He also co-wrote "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" and "The Fantastic Mr. Fox." But with this inane comedy, his streak comes to a crashing halt.

Here, Gerwig flits around as shallow New Yorker Brooke, who meets up with her future step sister, young Tracy (a comatose Lola Kirke from "Gone Girl"), as they romp through some fantasy sorority night life before heading to the suburbs to confront Brooke's nemesis, the tweely named Mamie-Claire, who stole both her schlubby Goldman-Sachs boyfriend (the painfully unfunny Michael Chernus), and her stupid idea for a T-shirt. They are surrounded by cardboard characters, none of whom bring depth or humor to the party. All the while, Tracy is taking notes for a short story that she seemingly crafts overnight.

The script is spine-tingling in its ineptness. It plays like a rough draft taken straight from a week's worth of diary entries that Baumbach scribbled in a notebook while sipping lattes at Starbucks, and then expanded on improv-style by Gerwig, who is aged out of her edgy hipster phase in a blink. The one-liners fly quickly, but they generate winces rather than belly laughs. Baffled, I wrote down a bunch of the cranky, grumpy quips that you can just hear emanating from Baumbach's self-satisfied thoughts. Here is the parade of gross generalizations and middle-aged aphorisms that riddle the script like fatal bullet holes:

• "No one meets friends in classes."
• "We need a sleepover party!"
• "Must we document ourselves all the time. Must we??"
• "People can be not in the mood."
• "People wait in cars."
• "Everyone in high school is an asshole."
• "Rich people always give out bad Halloween candy."
• "Records are so warm."
• "Sometimes I don't know if you're a zen master or a sociopath."
• "I'm so impressed by you and worried for you at the same time."
• "You're funny 'cause you don't know you're funny."
• "I'm the same. I'm just the same in a different direction."
• "Stop calling her these old-timey names."
• "I just learned what 'case-sensitive' meant, seriously, like, yesterday."
• "You can't really know what it is to want things until you're 30."

At other times, Baumbach bombards us with intellectual babble disguised as class discussion or deep thoughts from random living-room study groups that seem to populate his world. Is he mocking these confabs or celebrating them? It's impossible to tell, and either way, he's whiffing more than riffing.

Meantime, the attempts at slapstick are embarrassing. Gerwig not only does a lame imitation of a person rewinding her actions on video, but she then comments on her clever maneuver -- and then does it again. Ugh. There is actually a scene of chess instruction, where one character (a young man, naturally) sets out to give another (a young woman, but of course) her first lesson, only to find himself in checkmate during their very first match! Has that gag worked (or even been attempted) since the Nixon administration? Oh, and that young woman is so irrationally (and inexplicably) jealous of her beau that Mel Brooks and Woody Allen would roll their eyes at the caricature.

As the characters pile up and the lunacy spins out of control -- and the credulity just snaps -- Baumbach and Gerwig crowd each scene with as many characters as possible, who spew one-liners with the timing of a Disney teen sitcom. At times you can almost hear Baumbach patting himself on the back and blurting out, "Look, I can write dialogue for seven people at once. Aren't I a clever boy?" You can actually notice actors walking into the frame, delivering a line, and then looking confused as to where they should step next.

And the acting cannot be defended. What worked flawlessly in "Frances Ha" comes off here as a retread at best, and screeching and mugging by Gerwig at worst. Kirke sounds like she's reading an operations manual throughout. The others would be best served to just leave this one off of their IMDb resumes.

Maybe this is all a big joke, Baumbach's wink at Stillman and Allen and others who live in their ridiculous literary/academic bubbles. "Mistress America" traffics in a good amount of stuck-up snooty types; it's a world where budding writer Tracy taps out her prose on onionskin, and when she submits an entry to the literary journal, rather than (in 2015) emailing or uploading a PDF, she daintily places one (1) pristine hard copy into the quaint inbox affixed to the exterior of the group's door, which is left playfully ajar.

If only Baumbach's script had been subjected to the red pen of an assiduous editor, or, better yet, crumpled into a ball and tossed in the direction of a wicker wastebasket that is theatrically littered all around with similarly scrunched-up discarded pages.