Mistress America (2015)

The films of Noah Baumbach tend to arrive with a certain downtown literary sheen, and Mistress America is no exception. Greta Gerwig co-wrote and stars as Brooke, a thirty-year-old whirlwind of half-finished ventures, while Lola Kirke plays Tracy, the Barnard freshman who mistakes her for a life. The two women dominate every scene. Their friendship, their arguments, and Tracy's hunger to become a writer supply the engine. A viewer scanning for a thesis about women's ambition will find the raw material sitting right there, unprocessed. Baumbach and Gerwig are after laughs, not argument, and the laughs are plentiful.

The supporting cast includes Jasmine Cephas Jones and Cindy Cheung, both of whom do their jobs and settle into the furniture of a story that belongs to white Manhattan. Nobody remarks on this. Nobody remarks on anything of the sort, because the film has no interest in remarking. Race never surfaces as a subject. Neither does sexuality, nor the body, nor the climate, nor the wiring of the mind. What the characters do care about is money: a restaurant called Mom's, a T-shirt business idea lifted by a friend, a check that arrives with strings attached. The screenplay treats all of it as farce. Commerce here is a source of humiliation and comedy, never a system to be indicted.

The extended set piece in a Connecticut mansion, where Brooke crashes a book club to beg for financing, is the closest the film comes to a sermon, and it is a sermon about nothing except the difficulty of being Brooke. The script observes. It needles. It never instructs. That restraint is the whole achievement. On the ledger of contemporary social instruction, the film registers as a faint mark, a comedy that trusts its audience to draw its own conclusions and mostly declines to supply any.