Frances Ha

Does 27 feel old? 23-years-old, which I’ll be in a week, is starting to feel that way: too young to really have forged a career in this day and age, yet too far out of school to still be coasting.

So it must feel ancient for someone like Frances (Greta Gerwig), the title character of “Frances Ha,” who is rapidly approaching that of a mature failure, but still feels young enough to be figuring things out. Noah Baumbach’s film captures the generational feel of modern millenials, much the same themes as Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” but does so in a way that feels fresh and personal.

Frances might just be a female Woody Allen surrogate for a new generation. Baumbach and Gerwig’s dialogue often feels like vintage “Hannah and Her Sisters,” with four-way conversations surrounding a dinner table that touch on joblessness, hipster poverty and casual hook-up culture in all the best ways, and all of it happening a mile a minute.

Her career has her living on next to nothing in big, shared apartments in various New York boroughs as she works as an apprentice at a dance company. But actual work within this perpetual internship is hard to come by, her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) has found a new apartment, boyfriend and job that don’t include Frances in the equation, and after breaking up with her boyfriend, Frances has been labeled by her male roommate Benji (Michael Zegen) as hopelessly “undateable.”

Not only is Frances “undateable,” she’s also un-functionable and her life is un-liveable. She’s smart, adventurous and ambitious, but then so is everyone else in her life, and they are having no greater success than she is.

But Frances is so intelligent, she and everyone around her can’t admit how bad they all have it. “You’re not poor; that’s offensive to actual poor people,” Benji says to her, but then what is she if not poor? Frances’s dance company instructor offers her a day job, not a spot as a dancer, and she declines and lies that she has other opportunities on the horizon. “Take your time,” the instructor says. “I will. I can’t help it.”

“Frances Ha” constantly plays on these feelings of being both things they are and aren’t. It’s hard to look at indie royalty Greta Gerwig and say she’s not a quirky hipster, but then here she is talking about how much she loves Jay Leno and movies with talking animals. She seems artistic and cultured, but what does the movie really show us that she’s into?

The film’s more talky approach over vignettes and anecdotes is just one way in which “Frances Ha” differentiates itself from “Girls.” Frances may be as much a train wreck as Hannah Horvath, but it’s certainly not embroiled in sex and pop culture.

It also has a classy black and white aesthetic that makes it stylish and arty, and yet this too is Baumbach being something the movie is not. Often the shots are intentionally empty and drab. The movie feels observant, but then at a swift 85 minutes, Baumbach smash cuts and diverts his attention more than you might expect of a simple little movie like this.

Even with such a short run time, “Frances Ha” begins to sink its title character too deep into the rabbit hole, but there’s solace for millenials in the audience in knowing that she and you are not alone in this modern mess.

3 ½ stars