Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha is a film that dares to ask, “What if we made a movie about someone with no money, no plan, no boyfriend, no real job, and no discernible growth—and then pretended it was charming?” It’s shot in crisp black and white to give it a timeless, European, Nouvelle Vague sheen, but underneath that art-house Instagram filter is 86 minutes of flailing, moping, and subway fare avoidance led by Greta Gerwig, playing a human shrug in ballet flats.
Frances Halladay (Gerwig) is 27, broke, and a self-proclaimed “undateable” mess. And we’re supposed to love her for it. She lives in New York City, which in this movie looks less like a cultural epicenter and more like a series of overpriced shoeboxes filled with passive-aggressive roommates and dreams deferred over artisanal coffee. Frances is a dancer, in the sense that she sort of teaches dance and kind of flails around during auditions that never amount to anything. Picture someone trying to interpret a seizure artistically and you’re halfway there.
This is a character who can’t hold down an apartment, a job, or a thought for more than ten seconds without spinning it into a whimsical anecdote. Frances isn’t just a mess—she’s the mess Baumbach and Gerwig want you to root for. But instead of being lovable or earnest, she feels like a self-satisfied mascot for millennial dysfunction. Her problems aren’t systemic. They’re self-inflicted. And every time you think she might wake up and take some accountability, she skips into the next scene with the grace of a hungover gazelle.
The film opens with Frances and her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) living together in a state of co-dependent bliss. They wrestle in parks, share beds platonically, and finish each other’s sentences with such alarming synchronicity you’d think they were prepping for a synchronized ennui competition. But then—gasp—Sophie decides to move out and get a life, which sends Frances spiraling into a series of increasingly delusional housing arrangements and quarter-life crises, all while refusing to get a real job or confront her own inertia.
Frances’s solution to every setback is to either move in with people she barely knows or run away to Paris using a credit card she can’t pay off. That’s right—this woman flies to Paris, alone, for a weekend, on a whim, and then falls asleep during a movie, proving that even in the city of lights, she is committed to her cause: being vaguely charming and fundamentally exhausting.
The men in this movie are footnotes, which might be progressive if the women were allowed to be anything other than satellites of Frances’s disorganized orbit. We meet Lev (Adam Driver, in full pre-Kylo Ren hipster gremlin mode), and Benji (Michael Zegen), both of whom embody the sort of Williamsburg male archetypes who wear ironic tank tops and say things like, “I’m not poor, I’m just spending my inheritance slowly.” None of them seem particularly interested in Frances, and honestly? Same.
The dialogue is Baumbachian to its core—snappy, overwritten, and allergic to sincerity. Characters talk in quotes, deliver lines like they’re reading from an NPR-hosted blog, and seem incapable of silence unless they’re using it to signal disapproval. Conversations jump between career anxiety, passive-aggressive banter, and pseudo-intellectual whining about art, love, and “not being a real person yet.”
Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the script, commits fully to the role, but her performance feels like someone weaponized whimsy. She twirls. She fumbles. She delivers lines like, “I’m so embarrassed. I’m not a real person yet,” with a mix of vulnerability and obliviousness that’s supposed to make you root for her, but mostly makes you wonder if this character would survive five minutes in an actual city that isn’t trying to romanticize failure.
And that’s really the issue here: Frances Ha wants you to fall in love with failure. It wants you to believe that being aimless is brave, that being broke is poetic, and that rejecting adulthood is a statement. But there’s a fine line between existential drifting and just being a mooch with a delusion of creative grandeur, and Frances pole-vaults over it in every scene.
The film’s black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous—unnecessarily so. It’s like Baumbach saw Manhattan and thought, “But what if we did this with fewer jokes and more unpaid internships?” The whole aesthetic screams serious film, but the content is about as deep as a latte foam heart. There’s no real plot. No arc. Just a series of vignettes in which Frances talks too much, dances too little, and learns virtually nothing until the final five minutes, when she kind of, sort of gets her act together in a way that feels tacked-on and unearned.
There is a moment toward the end where Frances stages a dance performance, and it’s supposed to be her “arrival”—her quiet triumph. But it lands like a damp paper towel on a hardwood floor. There’s no catharsis, no fire, no evidence that all of her flailing led to anything meaningful. It’s not a breakthrough. It’s just Baumbach politely telling the audience, “That’s all, folks,” before closing the curtain on a character who mistook self-absorption for growth.
Final verdict? Frances Ha is a movie for people who romanticize their own mediocrity. It’s a black-and-white love letter to privileged self-sabotage, a celebration of people who mistake personality quirks for depth and perpetual floundering for art. Watch it if you think life is a mixtape of missed connections and borrowed couches, or if you’ve ever used the phrase “I just need time to figure things out” while holding a tote bag full of unpaid bills and unread Camus.
Otherwise, skip it. Let Frances twirl into the abyss without dragging you along. Some coming-of-age stories end with wisdom. This one just ends with a nameplate that won’t fit on a mailbox.