Mistress America review – a bracing, peppery tonic

Despite what they say, old-school sophistication is not dead in the movies. Take American comedy’s golden couple, director Noah Baumbach and his star and co-writer Greta Gerwig. Life must be quite something in their household: you imagine the repartee flying so breathlessly over their morning muesli that the exhausted pair must have to sleep it off for the rest of the day, rising again in the evening to share dry negronis and still dryer aperçus about the latest excesses of the Williamsburg hipster set.

Arriving only four months after his While We’re Young, Mistress America is Baumbach’s third film with Gerwig as star, and the second that the couple have co-written, following 2012’s Frances Ha. If that film’s Frances was one of those comedy heroines that it’s hard not to fall for, Gerwig’s character in Mistress America is more complex and confounding – a woman crackling with charisma and energy, yet arrogant, egocentric and, to some ex-acquaintances, downright monstrous.

Like While We’re Young, about a couple spellbound by the ostentatious “authenticity” of two younger hipsters, Mistress America is another comedy of cultural infatuation. Its heroine is Tracy (Lola Kirke), an ambitious but gauche 18-year-old who arrives in New York to study literature but can’t motivate herself either to work or to fit in socially. Then she makes contact with 30-year-old Brooke (Gerwig), who’s due to become her stepsister by marriage. They hit it off instantly, with Tracy bowled over by Brooke’s sophistication and brio: here’s a clever, dynamic, independent woman who juggles work as an aerobics instructor, interior decorator and maths tutor, and plans to open an eatery that’s nothing less than the ultimate lifestyle hangout (“It’s a restaurant, but also where you cut hair”). Under Brooke’s influence, Tracy becomes the Manhattanite she always wanted to be. Better still, she now has someone to write a short story about – which she calls Mistress America, after a TV show for which Brooke once had a great idea (Brooke has a lot of great ideas, but, someone points out, “no follow-through”).

Then Brooke’s glittering plans unravel, and a medium advises her to confront a long-time enemy – so she and Tracy drive to Connecticut to visit Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), the woman who not only married Brooke’s old boyfriend but also stole her best T-shirt concept. When the film reaches Mamie-Claire’s chilly modernist mansion, Mistress America settles into an extended centrepiece involving multiple characters – including a couple of Tracy’s fellow students, an angry neighbour and a member of a pregnant women’s reading group (this week’s texts: Faulkner and a biography of Derrida, for light relief). This whole section is really something, with its hectic, pointedly theatrical choreography of multiple characters in a stage-like space: it feels like a Jean Renoir film (US directors don’t come more francophile than Baumbach) in which several games of table tennis are taking place at once.

Mistress America is knowingly erudite in a way that a certain bracket of American cinema is unashamed to be – take Alex Ross Perry’s recent bookish Listen Up Philip or Josh Radnor’s 2012 campus-set Liberal Arts. Some viewers may find Baumbach and Gerwig’s humour here insufferably pretentious – but that’s the risk with comedies that skewer their characters’ pretensions.

Despite subplots about fatuous boyfriends, non-boyfriends and exes, Mistress America is above all about the relationship between two women, and their aspirations. Its leads are mesmerising. Gerwig punctuates Brooke’s abrasive dazzle with her idiosyncratic range of comic twitches, hesitations and eloquently abrupt sideways glances. In a more modest but no less winning performance, Lola Kirke – younger sister of Girls regular Jemima Kirke, and a near-ringer – somewhat steps into the shadows after the first act, as Tracy becomes Brooke’s follower and confidante. Beautiful but diffident, Tracy retreats into the armour of a fuzzy jumper and beret, observing the world with rueful eyes – but by the end, with her alertness and crack comic timing, Kirke has made the film her own.

A terrific support cast includes Heather Lind as Mamie-Claire, eggshell-crisp in her precarious composure, and Michael Chernus as Brooke’s unexpectedly Falstaffian ex.

This movie is head-spinningly chic, certainly – down to a soundtrack including Suicide’s sublime Dream Baby Dream – but it’s also a pointed commentary on people desperate to impress. While the comedy sometimes seems scattershot, this is arguably a subtler piece than While We’re Young, which perhaps a little single-mindedly speared its satiric target, the exhausting lure of hipness. At moments, Mistress America can leave you somewhat winded, as if you’ve been speed-reading a year’s worth of New Yorker literary blogs. But overall, it’s a bracing, peppery tonic. Right now, when it comes to urbane screen wit, Baumbach is the master, and Gerwig the undisputed mistress.