Noah Baumbach’s “While We’re Young” amounts to the most hilarious Woody Allen movie in forever, with Ben Stiller in top form as an updated variation of the self-deceiving documentarian the Woodman played in “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Like Allen’s character in the earlier film, Stiller’s Josh has spent years laboring on an unfinished film — a dirt-dry political treatise consisting mostly of interviews with an uncharismatic professor (here played by folk singer Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary fame), who threatens to drop dead on him before he’s finished.
Josh also teaches at the New School, where after class, unofficial auditor Jamie (a superb Adam Driver of “Girls”) starts gushing about Josh’s only previous (and virtually impossible-to-see) film.
Our insecure, neurotic, middle-aged hero is so flattered by Josh’s attention that it never occurs to him that the ambitious Jamie may be more interested in Josh’s father-in-law (Charles Grodin), a legendary (and hugely successful) documentary filmmaker with whom Josh has a strained relationship.
Josh’s wife, Cornelia (a somewhat underused Naomi Watts), who happens to be her father’s producer, is initially skeptical of Jamie’s motives. But she gets caught up in Josh’s enthusiasm — and the childless couple is suddenly having trouble relating to their best friends (Adam Horovitz and Maria Dizzia) after they become parents of a newborn.
So these aging Gen-Xers dive headlong into a new friendship with 20-something Jamie and his girlfriend Darby (Amanda Seyfried), who makes artisanal ice cream, even if their loft “is full of everything we once threw out” like electric typewriters, vinyl records and VHS tapes.
Setting his film in a privileged white world so familiar to Allen’s fans, Baumbach hilariously skewers things like hip-hop dancing and a mescaline-fueled encounter with a shaman — you half-expect Jeff Goldblum’s character from “Annie Hall” to show up looking for his mantra.
Baumbach even shamelessly lifts the ending from “Hannah and Her Sisters” — but remember, Allen certainly hasn’t been adverse to borrowing from Fellini and Bergman, among others.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Baumbach’s work, but channeling Allen so closely has inspired some really sharp sequences and lines, as when Jamie cons Josh into volunteering to work on his own dubious documentary.
“While We’re Young” is worth seeing just for a ruefully funny scene where Josh disputes his insistent doctor’s diagnosis that he not only has arthritis, but needs to wear glasses.