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'While We're Young' touches on anxieties of growing older

Noah Baumbach delivers a precise, amusing and deeply felt missive from the most anxious depths of mid-adulthood in "While We're Young," a comedy of manners in which the manners themselves are maddeningly in flux.

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play Josh and Cornelia, a 44-year-old documentary maker and his wife who, as the film opens, are helping their best friends welcome home a new baby. Bemused, unsure exactly how to differentiate between "The Three Little Pigs" and "This Little Piggie," they're clearly not yet parent material. Later, over wine and while ordering takeout, they extol the advantages of the freedom they promise they'll take full advantage of as soon as Josh finishes the six-hour film he's been working on for the past eight years.

Still, it's clear that something has shifted. But the nameless unease that has suddenly overtaken them disperses just as quickly when they meet 25-year-old Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried), who after attending one of Josh's lectures at the New School enthusiastically invite him and Cornelia to dinner. The couples enter into a kind of group folie à deux, with Josh flattered by Jamie's guileless admiration for his work and Cornelia soon ditching the exquisite torture of a mommy-and-me music class with her old pal to dance hip-hop with Darby and her cohorts.

Does it come as any surprise that all of the above transpires in Brooklyn? "While We're Young" possesses all the visual and lifestyle cues audiences have come to associate with that milieu from tutorials ranging from "Girls" to "The Slap." When they're not lunching at bespoke farm-to-table restaurants or attending a "street beach" party where normcore 20-year-olds quaff PBR, the couples hang mostly at Jamie and Darby's loft, appointed with a vast collection of vinyl, an assemblage of old-school typewriters and vintage board games and a live chicken - whose eggs, presumably, help Darby concoct her small-batch artisanal ice creams and almond-milk sorbets.

In any other hands, this many postmillennial signifiers in one film would be insufferable. But Baumbach has such an assured touch that what might have been a lazy burlesque becomes instead a thoughtful and resonant depiction of midlife anxiety - including but not limited to regret, compromise, envy and aspiration.

Like last year's big Oscar winner, "Birdman," "While We're Young" taps into the fear and loathing that accompany inevitable obsolescence. As in that film, its subject is a privileged, mostly white creative class whose practitioners have the luxury of agonizing over the tensions between careerism and artistic truth.

But Baumbach isn't content simply to chronicle the malaise: Just when you think "While We're Young" is going to be a pleasant bagatelle with predictable, if well-executed, gags about Kids Today, the filmmaker injects a provocative dose of ambiguity, turning the tables with an elegant, if slightly preposterous, flourish.

Baumbach and Stiller embarked on a courageous collaboration in 2010 with the bitter comedy "Greenberg." Here, they're once again completely in tune, with Stiller delivering one of his warmest, most appealing performances in years.

In fact, the entire cast has been impeccably assembled, from subtle doppelgängers Watts and Seyfried to former Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz (playing a besotted, sleep-deprived new dad) and Charles Grodin, who plays Josh's prickly former mentor and father-in-law, adding yet another reflective surface within the hall of mirrors Baumbach so artfully constructs. But if there's a standout performance in "While We're Young" it belongs to Driver, who may have been typecast as a freewheeling boho artiste but who nonetheless skillfully conveys his character's winsome charisma, which becomes exponentially more engulfing as his relationship with Josh grows more complex.

"While We're Young" has been beautifully photographed. At slightly longer than an hour and a half, the film also benefits from sprightly pacing, even including a bizarre, somewhat baggy interlude involving Peruvian hallucinogenics and some choice Vangelis cuts.

Baumbach judiciously calibrates fantasy and realism throughout "While We're Young" and winds up sharing impressions about parenthood, friendship, ambition and aging that viewers themselves most likely have harbored, whether they admit it or not. Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth.

"While We're Young"

★ ★ ★ ½

Starring: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Grodin, Adam Horovitz

Directed by: Noah Baumbach

Other: An A24 release. Rated R for language. 97 minutes

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