WHILE WE’RE YOUNG Trailer: Holy Shit, I’m Middle Aged

Young readers, do yourselves a favor: find a Noah Baumbach among the young crop of filmmakers. Find a director with a witty and cutting view of him or herself and his or her generation, and then follow that filmmaker as you both age. It's an enormous comfort to watch your life reflected onscreen, in all of its miniscule and silly glory. 

I'm glad I have Noah Baumbach, whose films The Squid and the Whale and Kicking and Screaming and Greenberg have been signposts in my own life and now, with While We're Young, it looks as though Baumbach is going to plant another marker in my personal timeline. In this film his Greenberg star Ben Stiller is an aging Gen Xer who can't quite let go of his youth and, when he meets young hip documentarian Adam Driver, he finds he doesn't have to. Of course we all know this won't exactly work out as planned, but I think Baumbach is going to have interesting things to say about my generation getting old, a generation that came of age in the shadow of the Peter Pan-afflicted Boomers. There's a line Stiller has in this trailer - 'For the first time in my life I've stopped thinking of myself as a child imitating an adult' - that speaks so many volumes to me. 

The trailer leans a little heavy on some of the wacky comedy elements, but I can't imagine that Naomi Watts in the hip hop dance class will be reflectve of the actual full tone of the movie (although Baumbach wrote Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, so really anything can happen now), but at least this looks to be a move away from the bitter cynicism of Greenberg (which also spoke to me loudly) and a move from the twee stylings of Frances Ha (which I fucking love). 

It's a new Baumbach. What else do you have to say?