The Idea of You (2024)

Michael Showalter's The Idea of You arrives with the soft gloss of a prestige romance and the faint hum of an argument tucked beneath the linen. Anne Hathaway plays Solène, a 40-year-old gallery owner who stumbles into an affair with the 24-year-old frontman of a boy band, and the film takes her side with the quiet insistence of a thesis. Her desire is treated as legitimate. Her humiliation, when the internet turns on her with its customary cruelty, is rendered as a genuine injury. There is a critique here of the double standard that lets older men date younger women without comment while punishing the reverse. It is a mild critique, delivered through scenes and glances instead of speeches, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. The film has the good sense to let its characters argue its case for it.

On the matter of representation, the ensemble is largely white, and the handful of performers of color in the fictional band are simply present, not positioned as a statement. Race is not a subject the film engages, and it does not pretend otherwise. Nor does it extend its sympathies to questions of climate, economic inequality, or body image. The art world and the pop machine are rendered as glittering backdrops, and the wealth moving through them is accepted without a raised eyebrow. Nobody eats anyone. The romance is the point, and the film knows it.

Where the film flirts with instruction, it does so gently. Lessons about self-discovery and the cost of public scrutiny arrive as plot, not pamphlet, and the screenplay trusts its star to carry the argument. She does, with a weariness that reads as wisdom. A wristwatch is left behind twice across the running time, a small mechanical gesture of longing that the film never bothers to explain. What we are left with is a glossy, competent romance that knows which progressive notes to touch and which to leave alone. It is a careful film. Careful is not the same as brave, but it is something.