I have been an ardent admirer of Noah Baumbach for quite a while now. From his beautifully nostalgic portrayal of the millennial lifestyle in Frances Ha and Mistress America to his delicate and moving portraits of family in The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) and The Squid and the Whale, he has found his niche in exploring familiar situations through bittersweet, tragicomic storytelling. While We’re Young feels like a film that represents both the focus on family and the focus on youth (as the title obviously suggests). I found While We’re Young to be a good, but not outstanding, work from Baumbach, who is normally exceptional, and while the quality of his filmmaking here is as idiosyncratic as ever, it ultimately did leave me desiring more, especially from a film with such an audacious and original concept. Baumbach has a magnificent knack for tapping into the inner neuroses of the human condition, and while While We’re Young is not different, it also lacks the spark that made some of the filmmaker’s previous work just somewhat more special.

Josh (Ben Stiller) is a filmmaker living in New York City with his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts). Cornelia is the daughter of a famed documentarian, Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin), an artist in whose shadow Josh constantly has to live. Despite this, Josh made one very successful and acclaimed documentary over a decade before, and since then has been working on an audacious (but also overlong and rambling) sophomore effort, which seems to be stagnant as Josh simply cannot get it to the point of his satisfaction. Almost by chance, a young couple enters into the life of Josh and Cornelia. Jamie (Adam Driver) is an amateur documentarian himself, and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried) makes artisanal ice-cream for a living. They are, for all intents and purposes, the archetypal “young” couple, a pair of hipsters who revel on the vintage and the unique. The older couple finds themselves bonding with the younger one, not only because they are fun-loving and give Josh and Cornelia a break from their mundane lives, but also because they feel like it allows them to be young again. However, it is soon determined that what appeared to be youthful spirit on the part of Jamie and Darby was far more superficial and meaningless than it appears, and Josh has to adapt to the fact that he may have been subjected to a particularly scathing double-cross at someone who he thought was his friend, but rather ended up using him for his own personal gain.

Ben Stiller has always given terrific performances under the guidance of Noah Baumbach, such as in Greenberg and the aforementioned The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected). Still has a certain everyman quality about him when he is given a character that is intended to be the cinematic embodiment of a mediocre middle-aged man in a midlife crisis, and Stiller certainly delivers in that regard with his performance in While We’re Young. In many ways, this film is exactly what we would expect from Stiller, but he still does what he does best here. While We’re Young is not an exciting Stiller performance, but it is a consistent one, and his portrayal of a faded artist who is trying to regain the respect he earned a decade before is wonderful, especially in the inner-turmoil he experiences, where he is forced to consider whether his previous success was due to his talents, or rather a stroke of genuine luck. He tries to prove his abilities by replicating the successful formula of his previous work, but to no avail – and what he is left with is an overlong, ridiculous collection of rambling, incoherent facts that do not take any shape that can be considered meaningful.

Josh is a character constructed around Stiller’s talents, and it helps that he has a scene-partner who is fully committed to her role  as the long-suffering wife who is attempting to regain her youth, as well as move out of the shadow of her husband, who is undeniably dedicated, but to the point where his own ambitions outweigh her own, and she has to continuously play second fiddle to her husband’s boyish obsession with youth. Watts and Stiller have great chemistry (but to be fair, I have yet to see a performance from the sublime Watts whereby she did not work exceptionally well with her co-stars), and their performances are solid and undeniably strong for what this film required. However, they were not extraordinary, and they were very much conventional portrayals of archetypal characters, and while they were good, they did not do very much in the way of doing something unforgettable – but the question is, does a film like While We’re Young need unforgettable performances?

The answer is, of course, very much so. I say this because While We’re Young has one very good performance, on behalf of Adam Driver. I will admit that I admire Driver immensely, and I find his ascension to the most daring actor of his generation, someone willing to take risks and works across genres and form in a way that is almost unparalleled. Whether it be in tentpole blockbusters (in particular, the one film franchise that not only features Driver in it, but features him as arguably the most important and pivotal character to the saga), or in intimate, meaningful independent or arthouse masterpieces, Driver is always brilliant. Driver is tailor-made for Baumbach and had worked with him before (and since), making him an important collaborator. However, in both Frances Ha and The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Driver was limited in the character being mostly supporting and inconsequential to the story. While We’re Young, on the other hand, has Driver playing a character that can rival that of his iconic Kylo Ren. Playing Jamie, an arrogant, smarmy sycophant who has very little depth and even less talent, Driver soars. I am biased towards Driver, admittedly, but he elevates the mediocrity of While We’re Young and makes it something worthwhile. Also, as much as I am fond of Amanda Seyfried, she seemed to be too subverted in her performance, and thus Driver had to essentially carry the bulk of being the embodiment of youthful arrogance, with Seyfried getting some good moments, but ones that are unfortunately all too scattered and subtle for the film as a whole. If there is a reason to watch While We’re Young, it’s for Driver, and Driver alone.

I honestly am slightly disappointed in While We’re Young. I have loved everything Baumbach has done to date, and I am an ardent supporter of his work. I didn’t dislike While We’re Young at all, but there was an element that was tangibly missing, and ultimately resulted in the film coming off as far more superficial and much less witty than it appears. I felt extraordinary ambivalence to this film, and while it had a wonderful concept and it executed it well, it just didn’t land as perfectly as one would have hoped. Its representations of the clash between generations were certainly entertaining and often hilarious, but they did not speak to the broader issues that Baumbach often focuses on and explores wonderfully. It is one of the weaker films in Baumbach’s filmography, not because it is bad, but because it lacks the soul and wit of his previous works, and the seriocomic beauty of his social critiques are entirely lost in While We’re Young, which otherwise just resembles a standard independent comedy about aging. It doesn’t say much, but it certainly is a sweet and quirky film that has a message and a concept but just does not know how to use it adequately. Baumbach is a terrific filmmaker, and my perspective on his work does not change, While We’re Young is just a characteristic misfire, and while it still has its merits, they are ultimately superficial and not nearly as profound as they could have been.