If you’ve seen Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg you may remember a scene in which the title character, played by Ben Stiller, unleashes a tirade against a roomful of 20-year-olds whom he believes have been ruined by sensitive parenting, among other things. While We’re Young, Baumbach’s buoyant, vinegar-laced new film, is not a sequel — Stiller plays Josh, a reasonably pleasant and well-adjusted guy for a Ben Stiller character in a Noah Baumbach picture — but it does pick up where the earlier movie left off in its exploration of the fraught relations between ascendant millennials and the rapidly ageing members of Generation X.

While We’re Young opens with some darkly funny lines from Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder that show the hostility directed against the rising generation by the middle-aged to be very old news. Of course it is. How could we not be terrified and resentful? Their evolutionary job is to correct our mistakes, to ignore our hard-won wisdom and to replace us, whether or not we’re ready. They need less sleep and look better in their clothes, and they’re so damn confident. Don’t get me started.

For about two-thirds of its fleet and mostly pleasant running time, however, While We’re Young presents a sun-dappled vision of inter-generational harmony. Josh and his wife, Cornelia (Naomi Watts), befriend Jamie and Darby, a 25-year-old married couple who open a portal into a new, cool parallel universe. It’s still New York, but it’s totally different. There are “street beach” parties and ayahuasca ceremonies, artisanal restaurants and thrift shops. Cornelia accompanies Darby (Amanda Seyfried) to a hip-hop exercise class. Josh goes bike riding with Jamie (Adam Driver) and buys himself a narrow-brimmed fedora.

Besotted with their new companions, Josh and Cornelia neglect their old friends Fletcher (Adam Horovitz) and Marina (Maria Dizzia), who seem preoccupied with their new baby. Josh and Cornelia, who decided not to have children after a series of miscarriages, seem to have more in common with Jamie and Darby in any case. And also more to learn from them. These youngsters take an impressive interest in the past: They collect vinyl records, VHS cassettes and manual typewriters, and have a healthy ability to take or leave the latest technology. When no one can remember the word “marzipan”, Josh pulls out his phone to Google it, but Jamie and Darby stop him. “Let’s just not know,” Jamie says.

Is that wisdom or willful ignorance? Either way, Baumbach is, as usual, a piquant observer of the manners and morals of the various demographic subsets of the white, urban lower-upper-middle class. He is without peer among screenwriters as a composer of incisive, non-punchline-driven comic dialogue, and unrivalled among directors as a choreographer of fraught social encounters.

He is also, like many a child of his era, obsessed with the finer points of pop-cultural taste. “I remember when this song was just supposed to be bad,” Josh marvels when Jamie, with apparent sincerity, plays Eye of the Tiger for inspiration. 

I have some problems with this movie, not all of which can be ascribed to the usual narcissism of small differences. But first it’s important to acknowledge the acuity of Baumbach’s insight and his overall generosity of spirit.

Generosity, as it happens, is the film’s key ethical principle. It’s the quality Josh most admires in Jamie and Darby and finds most lacking in himself. A documentary filmmaker who has spent most of a decade working on a sprawling, incomplete project on “power in America”, Josh marvels at his young friends’ apparent indifference to success, at their open, eager embrace of experience. He and Cornelia seem crabbed and cautious by comparison.

This film mostly brings a light touch and a forgiving gloss to its own self-consciousness. It is not afraid to be implicated in the confusion — in the self-involvement, the anxiety, the pettiness — it depicts. But there are also areas where it feels soft and compromised, where the subtlety and clarity of Baumbach’s vision seem to desert him. 
Ambition in this movie, as in Judd Apatow’s somewhat similar This Is 40, is a guy thing. Men make movies. Women make ice cream or babies, or help the men make their movies. 

At times the movie seems aware of the limitations of its own perspective, and struggles against them. Fletcher is a stay-at-home dad; Darby experiences a feminist awakening, though nobody quite calls it that. But in spite of those moments, and in spite of the happy, good-humoured companionship that exists between Josh and Cornelia, Mr Baumbach never quite grants the women in the movie equal access to their own lives, or to the audience’s empathy. His title turns out to be doubly ironic: We’re not really young, and we’re not really “we.

A.O. Scott
(The New York Times News Service) 

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