I always think I'm going to hate Baumbach's films and never do: While We're Young reviewed

Every time I sit down to a Noah Baumbach film I think I’m going to hate it, but I never actually do. From the French New Wave idiosyncrasies of 2013’s Frances Ha to the growing pains of his semi-autobiographical breakthrough The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach always manages to stay just the right side of pretentious, creating lively hipster-filled worlds that amuse as much as they annoy.

Nowhere is this delicate balance more on display than in While We’re Young, a heartbreaking and cautiously funny swipe both at unwelcome middle age and the follies of youth. For Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), the childlessness of their forties has hit them somewhat unexpectedly. Suddenly the well-meant but overbearing concern of two friends who have recently become parents pushes them to look for new experiences beyond the confines of their middle-aged world (never has a baby music class filled them — or me — with such terror) and they start hanging out with two liberated twenty-somethings, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), who reignite their creative passions, encourage them to wear fedoras and invite them to pseudo-spiritual hallucinogenic gatherings. This Is 40, Baumbach could have called the film, if Judd Apatow hadn’t already taken that title.

Jamie, like Josh, is a film-maker and, to begin with at least, his professional admiration and hunger for guidance fills Josh with a sense of accomplishment he has long felt missing from his own career, where he has been making the same documentary for nearly a decade after a single hit film in his youth. But the youngster’s esteem also makes him question everything he has achieved thus far — or hasn’t. Is his career going anywhere? Has his marriage become dull? And, most pressingly of all, are he and Cornelia drawn to youth because they are unwilling to grow up? Can they really be a success without children?