There’s a special kind of cinematic purgatory reserved for films about overeducated 20-somethings who smoke clove cigarettes, quote Foucault, and treat emotional stagnation like a badge of honor. Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming (1995) is the flag-bearing film of that movement—a shaggy, aimless little debut about a group of freshly minted liberal arts graduates who spend the entirety of their post-college year doing what most of us try to forget about our own: absolutely nothing.
This movie is 96 minutes of people not making decisions.
This is what it’s like: you’re at a party. You find yourself in the kitchen with a guy named Grover (seriously), who won’t stop talking about his ex-girlfriend while drinking a warm beer and explaining why he can’t possibly take a job that requires, you know, effort. That guy is this movie.
Our protagonist Grover, played by Josh Hamilton (whose resting face screams “I can explain Kerouac to you”), has just graduated college and is processing his breakup with Jane (Olivia d’Abo), who had the audacity to move to Prague for grad school instead of sitting around watching him read back issues of The New Yorker.
Grover is joined by a sad-boy cabal of similarly stunted bros: there’s Max (Chris Eigeman, delivering his usual one-man New Yorker cartoon performance), who’s smart, sardonic, and allergic to change; Otis, who’s so indecisive he can’t even book a flight; and Skippy, a neurotic mess clinging to his relationship with a freshman, which is less cute and more “please see the campus handbook.”
They all hang around their college town post-graduation like ghosts haunting the student union. They drink. They wax nostalgic about how smart they were five months ago. They get jobs bartending or not at all. They argue over semantics. One of them starts a trivia night. It’s basically The Big Chill if no one had any trauma, life experience, or functional bowel movements.
Baumbach, who would go on to make sharper, deeper films (The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story, White Noise, even While We’re Young), here delivers a first feature that feels like it was workshopped entirely in a dorm common room between bong hits and debates over whether Kierkegaard would use an Apple or a PC.
The dialogue is fast, glib, and proud of itself—like Aaron Sorkin if he’d majored in Film Theory and didn’t believe in plot. People talk and talk and talk, usually about nothing. There’s a lot of namedropping: Tolstoy, Pynchon, Kierkegaard. You’ll hear more literary references than emotional insights. It’s like watching Seinfeld but without the jokes and with more sweaters from J. Crew’s fall catalog.
Plot? Don’t ask. There isn’t one. Things happen in the way things happen in real life when you’re 22 and refuse to grow up: slowly, passively, and mostly offscreen. Grover mopes about Jane. Otis doesn’t go to grad school. Max insults everyone in ways that suggest he thinks he’s better than them but actually just needs a hug and some carbs. Occasionally, someone has sex, but only if they’re wearing enough wool to suggest deep inner conflict.
The film is structured like a diary of missed opportunities and half-hearted attempts at being profound. Everyone is stuck. They know they’re stuck. They talk about how stuck they are. But they do nothing about it. And that’s the movie.
Stylistically, Baumbach goes for mumblecore before mumblecore had a name. The camera barely moves. The lighting is flat. The music is wall-to-wall 90s coffeehouse acoustic—like the Indigo Girls had a one-night stand with early R.E.M. and recorded it on cassette. Visually and aurally, it’s beige. Emotionally, it’s stale.
The performances range from “serviceably detached” to “were you even awake during that take?” Josh Hamilton plays Grover as if he’s constantly on the verge of falling asleep inside his own monologue. Chris Eigeman is basically doing a drier version of the role he played in Metropolitan and later in every other Baumbach movie—a smug jerk with a vocabulary. The women? Forgettable. Not in talent, but in how they’re written. They serve largely as plot devices or emotional backboards for the men to bounce their unresolved mommy issues off of.
The one female character with any agency—Jane—is literally offscreen for most of the movie, sending postcards from Prague like she’s on a semester abroad from a better movie. When she finally shows up, it’s for one of those “ambiguous late-night airport confessionals” that indie films used to confuse with real emotion.
To be clear, Kicking and Screaming isn’t bad in the way, say, The Room is bad. It’s competently made. It knows its audience. The problem is that it’s insufferably pleased with itself for saying nothing at all. It’s like Baumbach cracked open his undergrad journal, spilled some black coffee on it, and then filmed the wet pages.
At its worst, it feels like a parody of indie cinema—a self-satisfied loop of clever dialogue and emotional inertia. At its best, it’s an accurate portrait of post-college existential drift that’s just too honest to be watchable. It knows the pain of being 22 and useless—but it romanticizes that pain instead of interrogating it. These characters need therapy, jobs, and some rough contact with adult consequences—not another late-night conversation about The Waste Land.
Final verdict? Kicking and Screaming is a film for people who miss college but not because they liked learning—because they liked hearing themselves talk. It’s a movie that thinks ennui is a plot device, irony is character development, and refusing to grow up is an act of intellectual bravery.
Watch it if you enjoy films where everyone looks like they’re about to launch a startup selling vintage typewriters and kombucha. Or better yet, put on a turtleneck, open a copy of Infinite Jest, and stare into space for 96 minutes. Same experience. Less regret.