Fortysomething pair risk alienation as they pursue lost youth

Noah Baumbach has been documenting his own life passage in narrative films ever since his post-college debut, 1995's Kicking and Screaming, so it makes all kinds of sense that his new film posits the disconcerting conundrum of the mid-40s adult who finds his life becoming ever more staid, even as the desire to retain the last fringes of his youthful self begins the inexorable retreat into actual maturation. For many of us, this comes almost entirely against our wills: Before we know it, our minds are dulled, our bodies betray us, as our children begin to sap our lives right from under us.

As with 2010's Greenberg, about a cantankerous crank who falls in love despite himself (and coincidentally, the film that introduced Baumbach to his current paramour, Greta Gerwig), Baumbach's perfect cinematic stand-in remains Ben Stiller, whose wounded sense of proportion and nasal outrage are suitably well-honed here. He plays Josh, an irascible documentary filmmaker stuck in the morass of a half-finished project for eight years. Josh and his film producer wife, Cornelia (Naomi Watts), whose famous and celebrated documentarian father (Peter Yarrow) stands in marked contrast to her struggling husband, live a relatively happy if not overly sedate life, spending time with another married couple (Adam Horovitz and Maria Dizzia) and admiring the couple's newborn from a veritably safe distance.

This equilibrium is disrupted when Josh meets Brooklyn hipsters Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried) and is immediately drawn to the couple's extravagant exuberance and ironic attachment to all things pre-technology. Playing to Josh's long-suffering ego, Jamie claims to be a huge fan of his previous work, a fact that swells Josh's head despite himself. Soon, Cornelia is also taken with the youngsters. They are the kind of couple who live in a huge loft, wear fetching old fedoras and own a live chicken. Delighted to have a protege at last, Josh (dubbed, affectionately, "Yosh" by Jamie), starts to assist his young friend with his own documentary filmmaking career, an act of uncharacteristic generosity, even sharing one of his go-to experts who happens to be the basis of Josh's yet unrealized film.

The more Josh and Cornelia hang out with Jamie and Darby, the more affected they become, and the further they distance themselves from their more age-appropriate friends with their marriage complications and bratty children running underfoot. Before long, Josh is rocking his own vintage fedora, cruising on a fixed-gear bike, hitting up "street beach" parties, and attending a Peruvian hallucinogen overnight with his wife.

Thing is, as they start to lose contact with their old friends, now happily ensconced in young parental social climbs, they begin to lose their hold on each other as well.

Considering the rising proliferation of films touching on this very subject (This Is 40, Wanderlust, the coming ribald The Overnight, and last summer's dreary comedy hit Neighbors, among others), it's pretty clear this generation's collection of 40-something filmmakers are enduring more than their share of midlife crises and plan to at least suffer productively by documenting their experience for the world to witness. Notably, all of this particular batch are comedies -- one sure-fire way to approach one's impending mortality and obsolescence without collapsing in a fetal position on the floor -- but each film has another implicitly dark idea behind it: Hang on to whatever youth you have left, else you'll find yourself saddled with kids, spouses, unhappy careers and, in Josh's case, the beginnings of a serious arthritis problem.

It's no wonder, then, that these beleaguered and terrified Gen-X'ers would seek to return to the freedom and the romantic, self-centered narcissism of being 25 all over again. What with the hipster's penchant for ironic toys and practically all banal pop-cultural iconography from the '70s and '80s, it's practically equivalent -- though in Baumbach's vision, there can still eventually be a cultural bridge too far: Toward the end, when the older couple have started to become disillusioned with the fantasy of youth, Josh becomes enraged when Jamie and a friend appropriate the name for a proposed goofy band they'll never quite get around to forming ("That's my commercial!" he shouts at them). The appeal of the young hipster is readily apparent with their utter lack of self-censure, denying themselves absolutely nothing, no experience, no matter how infantile, macabre or obscure, as long as it sounds like a kick.

Eventually, of course, as here, our protagonists have to grudgingly concede their appropriate place in their lives and admit the idea of an all-night binge party at a pickle factory sounds a good deal more exhausting than straight-up madcap fun.

And a good thing, too: There is an alternative for Josh, of course, but it invokes being one of those sad people who has totally aged out of the scene but still refuses to let go of it, showing up at acid-drenched poetry slams and trying to prove he still hasn't lost his way, when it's clear to everyone else he has become as ancient and brittle as a week-old oatmeal cookie placed under a sun lamp.

If Baumbach's film eventually takes a slightly unwelcome turn to lumbering plot heaviness in its final act, it sparkles with more than enough wit and pathos to make up for it elsewhere. As with much of Baumbach's best work (as with one of his great cinematic predecessors, Woody Allen), you can sense him working out some personal demons and conundrums within the narrative of his film. Josh, with his diminished ego and prickly professional trajectory, could well be any one of us whose lives haven't amounted to as much as we might have hoped. But even so, there appears to be a thread of hope in our acceptance of our mortality. Aging is indeed a horror, the film suggests, but the greater tragedy is to be a man stuck out of time.

MovieStyle on 04/17/2015