Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young is a film that sets out to dissect the generational divide between Gen X and millennial hipsters—and promptly slices its own credibility open like a thrift store beanbag chair full of stale irony and kombucha. It wants to be clever, insightful, maybe even profound. What it ends up being is a feature-length TED Talk delivered by a man who just found out about fixed-gear bikes and thinks artisanal pickles are the death of Western civilization.
The premise is tailor-made for a smug Baumbach morality play: Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) are a married couple in their mid-40s who live in Brooklyn, have no kids, and are quietly suffocating beneath the weight of unfulfilled dreams and slowly encroaching irrelevance. Josh is a documentary filmmaker—because of course he is—who has been working on the same “important” project for a decade, which is basically just a glorified PowerPoint about corporate influence narrated like a TEDx hostage video.
Enter Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a younger, cooler couple who crash into Josh and Cornelia’s lives like a pair of anthropomorphized Instagram filters. Jamie is also a documentary filmmaker, albeit one with zero shame, no real talent, and the ability to manipulate everyone around him while wearing a porkpie hat. Darby makes ice cream with weird flavors—because what else would she be doing in a Noah Baumbach film? Marketing artisanal guilt? Selling homemade deodorant from a reclaimed canoe?
Josh and Cornelia are instantly enamored. These kids are authentic! They own typewriters, vinyl records, VHS tapes—they’re like a walking Etsy storefront dipped in irony. Jamie and Darby, meanwhile, are fascinated by their new middle-aged friends because… well, honestly, it’s never clear why. Maybe they’re bored. Maybe they want to see what desperation looks like in skinny jeans. Either way, the film spends the first hour pretending this relationship is mutually enriching before flipping the table and saying, “Surprise! The kids are manipulative narcissists and the adults are gullible idiots.”
The message? Beware of cool young people bearing retro aesthetics. They will steal your career, your self-worth, and possibly your couch.
Now, let’s talk about tone. While We’re Young can’t decide if it’s a satire, a drama, or a middle-aged crisis memoir disguised as a screenplay. It lurches between quirky comedy and emotional commentary with all the grace of a drunk dad on a hoverboard. One moment Josh is attending hip-hop yoga with Jamie; the next, he’s delivering a rant about moral decay in modern media while clutching a Blu-ray copy of The Fog of War. It’s tonal whiplash wrapped in corduroy and panic.
Stiller, playing yet another version of “intellectual sad man with beard and crumbling masculinity,” tries his best, but he’s stuck in a script that confuses pettiness for poignancy. His character is written as if Baumbach made a bingo card of Gen X anxieties—professional stagnation, creative jealousy, fear of being irrelevant—and then built a protagonist out of the most annoying squares. Naomi Watts, meanwhile, is given almost nothing to do beyond frown, say things like “I don’t know who we are anymore,” and awkwardly participate in an ayahuasca ceremony like she’s auditioning for a Goop ad gone wrong.
Adam Driver, to his credit, is a greasy tornado of faux-sincerity. He plays Jamie with the smug intensity of a man who just read Infinite Jest and now considers himself a public intellectual. Driver leans into the manipulation, the charm, the faux-authenticity—and he almost makes it work. But the script, like the character, is too hollow to sustain the weight of any deeper commentary. Jamie isn’t a villain—he’s a mirror held up to a filmmaker who’s mad that the kids today don’t worship Errol Morris.
And that’s where the film really starts to unravel. Baumbach clearly has bones to pick with youth culture, media ethics, and the changing definition of authenticity. But instead of exploring those ideas with nuance, he just throws a tantrum in 35mm. Jamie becomes the straw-man millennial—shallow, conniving, viral-hungry—and Josh becomes the sad prophet, ignored and bitter and completely out of touch.
The generational critique isn’t insightful—it’s cranky. The film doesn’t ask, “What can we learn from each other?” It screams, “These damn kids are ruining everything!” It’s the cinematic equivalent of a guy in his 40s yelling “Back in my day!” while deleting TikTok from his phone for the fourth time.
Visually, the movie is fine. It’s shot like an independent film that wandered into a Levi’s commercial—lots of clean interiors, wistful lighting, and characters walking around Brooklyn in clothes that look like they were stolen from a Wes Anderson set dressing truck. The music is aggressively on-the-nose, and every scene feels like it’s about to break into a montage of people writing manifestos on typewriters while sipping matcha from a Mason jar.
As for the story? It goes nowhere. Josh finally finishes his film, but no one cares. Jamie succeeds by being shameless. Cornelia disappears into emotional wallpaper. Darby opens an ice cream shop. The film ends not with transformation, but with resignation. Josh and Cornelia ride the subway with a baby they didn’t want earlier in the movie, now miraculously content to embrace the nuclear mediocrity they spent the whole film resisting. It’s not a conclusion—it’s surrender with a baby carrier.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 ironic fedoras.
Watch it if you enjoy watching people complain about the modern world while wearing $300 vintage shoes and quoting Susan Sontag. Everyone else: skip it. While We’re Young is a film obsessed with authenticity that forgets to be authentic itself. It tries to be wise, but ends up just wagging a finger. And nobody likes getting lectured by a guy who still thinks the VCR was the pinnacle of cinematic purity.