Baumbach: While We're Young (2015)

Over the last couple of years, hipster-bashing has become almost eponymous as hipsters themselves, so there’s something quite refreshing about a film that manages to make both parties feel as original – in a sense – as Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young. In part, that’s because Baumbach’s tone is more quizzical than cynical, as he outlines the relationship between a New York couple in their forties, Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) and a New York couple in their twenties, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Josh is a struggling documentarian, and the film largely revolves around his efforts to nurture and mentor Jamie, an aspiring documentarian, by way of his father-in-law, Leslie (Charles Grodin), a legendary, canonical documentarian in the vein of the Maysles brothers or Frederick Wiseman. As their relationship develops, insights into hipster ritual abound, from a psychedelic vomitorium set to the Love Theme from Blade Runner, to a wonderful conversation in which Josh and Cornelia go to check their SmartPhones for a factoid, only to be told by Jamie and Darby that it’s cooler to try and remember and, if they can’t remember, to simply not know. Set pieces aside, though, the film beautifully captures the peculiar puzzle that hipsters present to Generation X – namely, that they’re not actively rebelling against anything, or trying to create some definitive, original generational statement, but instead open to the past in a way that makes seem them seem more alive and authentically connected to Josh and Cornelia’s generation (and every previous generation) than Josh and Cornelia are themselves. In fact, precisely what’s unsettling – and comic – about Jamie and Darby is how open they are to Josh and Cornelia full stop, embracing their oldness with a reparative gusto that’s so uniform and all-encompassing that it gives the first and most distinctive act of the film a weirdly narcotised mildness, a burgeoning sense that the conflict is actually that there is no longer any generational conflict. Totally uninterested in positioning themselves at the forefront of some up-and-coming avant-garde, Jamie and Darby epitomise the arriere-garde that drives hipster culture, furnishing their lives with the detritus of previous youth culture and, far from deriding Josh and Cornelia as old fogeys to be thrown out with the past, curating and revelling in cultural associations that even they can barely remember or recognise personifying. Whether it’s pro or anti-hipster culture, then, is a little bit ambivalent, just as it’s unclear how much these hipsters are curating and how much they are cannibalising the past that suddenly seems to be even more authentically theirs than the people who lived through it. Some critics have argued that the ending – an extended, intercut monologue by Stiller and Grodin – removes this ambivalence, but that’s to ignore the wonderful way in which brings it all back to documentary, positing hipsters as the products of a world in which the differences between documentary and fiction, on-camera and off-camera, and cinematic and lived experience have been dissolved as never before. Perhaps that’s why Bambach’s tone often feels documentarian as well, both in its breathlessness and banality – there’s an uneasy alliance here with a world in which documentary per se no longer exists (if only because no film can entirely escape it anymore) that gives this film just enough grace, and just enough awkwardness, to prevent it ever feeling too old.