‘While We're Young' captures anxiety of aging

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 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 an old pal to dance hip-hop with Darby and her cohorts.

“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 and vintage board games.

“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.

Stiller delivers one of his warmest, most appealing performances in years. In fact, the entire cast has been impeccably assembled, from subtle doppelgangers 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. 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.

Baumbach judiciously calibrates fantasy and realism throughout and winds up sharing impressions about parenthood, friendship, ambition and aging that viewers themselves most likely have harbored. Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth.