While We’re Young review: the young and the feckless

Young people are frightful. Look at their creaky bicycles, their vinyl “records” and their analogue board games. Listen to them going on about Pleistocene-era hair rock and food that actually tastes of its ingredients. Would they ever stop looking forwards to the day before yesterday?

A new, endlessly confusing generation gap is just one of the subjects skewered in the brilliant new comedy from Noah Baumbach. Each time the director releases a film, we find ourselves pondering his uneasy relationship with the highbrow east coast world. The Squid & the Whale was mildly appalled by its characters' self-importance. Margot at the Wedding was far too tolerant of the pampered neurotics.

With Frances Ha and, now, While We're Young Baumbach has got the chemistry just right. The new film is generous in its disdain. Proudly childless middle-aged couples get as much stick as do inductees into the cult of late parenthood. The hipsters are preposterous. But the older folks aping their moves are pathetic. Yet somehow While We're Young never seems like a mean-spirited piece of work.

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play Josh and Cornelia, a couple who could have been plucked straight from a New Yorker cartoon. Intense and frantic, Josh – like Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanours – has spent aeons working on a documentary structured around an elderly intellectual. He and Cornelia think they get along, but the relationship begins to judder when they run into Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a younger couple with impeccable credentials in contemporary Bohemia. Jamie is also a documentarian; Darby makes artisan ice cream.

The phrase "run into" is deceptive. As the film progresses, suspicions develop that Jamie engineered the meeting to secure a connection with Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin), Cornelia's dad. A distinguished documentary film-maker, Breitbart would open any number of doors for the young Turk. There is a great deal of All About Eve bubbling around While We're Young.

Before those plotlines unravel, we get to watch the hilarious spectacle of Josh and Cornelia engaging with their new friends’ lives. Jamie initially comes across as endlessly open and collaborative, but when the bill arrives he always expects the older couple to pay. The new generation (is there an antonym for “neophyte”?) not only listen to music on vinyl, they even find time to play cassettes. “This is just like my record collection,” Josh says. “Only mine is all in CD.” They have a pet rooster. They shun mobile phones. Before long, Josh is wearing a hat and riding a bike.

The new hipster has, in recent years, proved an easy (and deserved) target for satirists. What distinguishes Baumbach's sortie is its highlighting of the apparent effortlessness at work. The excellent TV series Portlandia depicts characters straining every muscle to be fashionable. That's a comforting scenario for older, less hip people. It's far more infuriating to endure a couple who really do appear comfortable with their achingly right-on analogue existence. Jamie and Darby may be annoying, but they're not quite poseurs.

It’s a shame that such an otherwise engaging film – no previous Baumbach release featured quite so many one-lined zingers – comes up short with its females. Watts and Seyfried are good, but they can’t shake the notion that both roles are appendages to their male partners.

There is enough going on for us to forgive Baumbach that lapse. Decorated with many delicious handheld shots in busy New York, the picture manages the tricky feat of being utterly ruthless without quite turning misanthropic. The director may laugh at his own generation and positively howl at the one coming up, but he shows proper respect for Breitbart and his contemporaries. A penultimate, slightly forced sequence involving a tribute to the great man ends with a suggestion that everyone stop fretting so much.

Good advice. If, however, it were followed we have no Woody Allen, no Martin Scorsese, no John Cassavetes and, most certainly, no Noah Baumbach.