Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America is a film that tries to be a screwball comedy for the modern age—but forgets to bring the comedy, the screwball, or even a functioning plot. Co-written by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig (who also stars), this 2015 indie calamity is like watching someone try to recreate Bringing Up Baby after downing a bottle of kombucha, reading two pages of The Bell Jar, and crashing face-first into a New York sidewalk covered in ironic tote bags and unpaid credit card bills.
The premise seems promising—at first. Lonely, anxious college freshman Tracy (Lola Kirke) has just moved to New York and doesn’t know anyone. Her mom is about to marry a man whose daughter, Brooke (Greta Gerwig), is a thirtysomething human exclamation point living in Times Square, spewing ambition and life advice like a malfunctioning TED Talk hologram. Tracy meets Brooke, and boom: she’s whisked into a 24-hour tornado of frantic monologues, manic non sequiturs, failed business plans, and enough vocal fry to rupture the ozone layer.
Brooke, as a character, is what happens when you build a person entirely out of literary references, self-mythologizing, and unpaid bills. She wants to open a restaurant-slash-community center-slash-hair salon-slash-art gallery called “Mom’s”—a place for “creative people to come together and be alone.” This is a real line in the movie. She says this with absolute sincerity, and no one slaps her. Instead, Tracy is dazzled. The audience, meanwhile, begins questioning their own life choices.
Gerwig plays Brooke as if she’s three espresso shots away from complete cardiac failure. She talks constantly, and never with a point. It’s all blather, bravado, and big gestures—like if Holly Golightly were raised on Tumblr and cocaine. Every word out of her mouth is meant to be quotable, but most of them just feel like someone overdosed on thesaurus tabs and delusion. She refers to herself as “a beacon of hope for the worst things in the world.” No. She’s a beacon of cringe in a sea of privilege.
Tracy, meanwhile, is the kind of character who seems to be built entirely out of internal monologues and passive aggression. She’s soft-spoken, judgmental, and uses Brooke as both muse and metaphor. Naturally, she writes a short story about Brooke without telling her, submits it to a college literary magazine, and then looks surprised when it blows up in her face. That’s not a spoiler—it’s telegraphed from space. If you’ve ever met a liberal arts freshman who used the phrase “liminal space” unironically, you’ve already seen this arc play out.
The film takes a hard left turn halfway through, morphing from New York hipster slice-of-life into an accidental stage play when the characters all pile into a Connecticut mansion for what can only be described as the worst bottle episode in indie film history. Here, Baumbach tries to channel classic farce: overlapping dialogue, people hiding in rooms, confrontations, confessions, and a small dog named after a philosopher. The scene goes on forever. It’s meant to be zany. It’s exhausting.
It’s like watching a Wes Anderson movie with none of the visual charm and all of the verbal diarrhea.
The supporting characters—all of whom are apparently required by law to be quirky—include Brooke’s ex-best-friend-turned-rival, her rich husband, his pregnant wife, and a teenage stepsister who speaks like she’s been trapped in a Jane Austen adaptation and just got dropped into a Girls episode. Everyone talks like they’re auditioning for a Noah Baumbach-themed escape room, and no one ever just says what they mean. It’s banter as self-flagellation.
Baumbach’s direction is fine in the way that oatmeal is fine. The film is competently shot but visually flat, mostly content to point the camera at Gerwig and let her go full Broadway meltdown while the rest of the cast tries not to look directly into the sun. The film moves at breakneck pace, but that doesn’t make it exciting—it just makes it feel like a panic attack in real-time.
The script, co-written by Baumbach and Gerwig, is painfully self-satisfied. It’s the cinematic equivalent of two people who met at a Barnes & Noble poetry reading and decided they were destined to rewrite the screwball genre using nothing but irony and trauma. Every line of dialogue is trying so hard to be clever that it completely forgets to be human. Characters monologue instead of speak. There’s no rhythm—just a machine gun of affectation.
And what’s it all about? Well, theoretically, Mistress America is about identity, female friendship, ambition, and the gulf between who we are and who we tell ourselves we are. But that message gets buried under a mountain of zingers and empty energy. Brooke is supposed to be a tragicomic figure—a woman deluded into believing she’s the protagonist in everyone else’s story—but the film is too infatuated with her to pull it off. It doesn’t critique Brooke. It just enables her.
The result is not an insightful character study. It’s an 86-minute YouTube vlog about emotional instability and startup failure.
By the end, nothing really changes. Tracy gets a short story published and sort of matures. Brooke has yet another meltdown, which somehow counts as “growth.” There’s a tearful monologue. A voiceover. A fade to black. You’re supposed to feel bittersweet and hopeful. Instead, you feel like you’ve just been trapped in a Whole Foods cheese aisle with two life coaches arguing over who gets the last wedge of aged regret.
Final verdict? Mistress America is a film about self-absorbed people made by people who are absolutely smothered in self-absorption. It’s a comedy that forgets to be funny and a drama that refuses to be serious. Watch it if you enjoy performative dysfunction, conversations that collapse under their own cleverness, and the exact moment you realize everyone in the room thinks they’re the main character.
Otherwise, leave Brooke at brunch where she belongs. With her vision board, her unpaid rent, and her monologues echoing into the empty void