While We're Young (2015)

While We're Young is a 2015 comedy of generational manners in which Josh, a stalled documentary filmmaker, befriends a younger couple and slowly discovers he is being outmaneuvered in the authenticity department. The milieu is specific and narrow: white, bookish creative professionals in Manhattan and Brooklyn who discuss sincerity over ayahuasca and measure their lives against the accomplishments of their fathers-in-law. Race never enters the frame as a subject, and neither does the climate, or the body, or the mind's varied wiring. This is a film about people who have the luxury of worrying about whether they are interesting.

The casting is uniformly pale, with a single voice role for Greta Lee as a Sundance interviewer, and no evident design behind it. Naomi Watts plays a producer wife whose marriage wobbles, though the film has no interest in advancing a critique of gender so much as observing two people drift apart. A hedge fund investor who cannot follow an intellectual documentary gets a mild drubbing, and the film does glance at the price of selling out for a better story. That is character comedy, not an argument about capital. It is a jab, not a manifesto.

Where the film comes closest to sermonizing, it pulls back into wry observation. The questions it raises about documentary ethics, staged footage, and the compromises of storytelling are real ones, but Baumbach delivers them through embarrassment and small betrayals instead of speeches. The result is a warm, rueful, faintly smug picture about people who mistake their taste for their morality. We are asked to watch a child play with an iPhone at the airport and infer that a new and morally inferior generation is coming. The film finds this funny. So, mostly, do we.