Mistress America is supposedly a quirky homage to screwball comedies from director Noah Baumbach. I think he should had taken advise from Peter Bogdanovich as to how to make modern screwball comedies.Tracy (Lola Kirke) is a misfit college freshman at a small university in New York where she is a little lonely and lost. She starts to hang out with her 30 year old step sister to be the malevolent Brooke (Greta Gerwig). Brooke's father is due to marry Tracy's mother.Tracy at first becomes captivated by Brooke's creativity, worldliness and carefree lifestyle. Brooke is angry that her previous creative ideas have been stolen and desires to open a restaurant but requires investors when her Greek boyfriend bales out. As explored in Baumbach's previous film 'When we're Young' the younger Tracy soon leeches from the older Brooke as she pilfers elements of Brooke's life for a short story.The film feels to much like a stage play, they literally do stand around as if they were on stage. They even deliver lines like the audience were in the same auditorium. The more people and talk over each other the film comes across as dull.If they did not mention things like Twitter and Google, I could swear the film was set in the 1980s as the soundtrack consists of 1980s mainly British synth music. Songs by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark turn up a few times.The film is in a minor key. It weaves from being smart and sassy to being just dull. At the end the younger Tracy realises that the older Brooke is destined for failure as she cannot follow up on her creativity. Tracy feels smug about it.

I thought this was a very good comedy, and very much in the spirit of Noah's other comedy oriented films; probably his funniest to date. Many funny lines. It carries insightful truths within it, but to me, reviewers who miss that this is a comedy, are missing the boat. But its a comedy that doesn't wait around for the viewer to catch up. In fact, I laughed more the second time I saw it because of the subtlety of the humor. The main characters have complexity, and the frosh college students actually act like college students. The central character, played beautifully by Greta Gerwig, captures a kind of person that very much exists in the world and is a very vibrant, paradoxical kind of person. She's a person you won't soon forget.

Over the years, I've liked some of Noah Baumbach's films, but not others, and this one I'm sorry to say was disappointing. Here, Baumbach directed and co-wrote the script with Greta Gerwig.The underrated and most talented Gerwig also stars in the movie as Brooke, a free spirit who's leading a whirlwind of a life, with a myriad of part-time jobs but looking to close a deal on a new restaurant, in the Williamsburg section of NYC.Lola Kirke co-stars here and gives a fine performance as Tracy, a first year college student at Barnard, aspiring to be a writer but having loads of problems fitting in on campus. Brooke and Tracy are slated to be step sisters when Brooke's father and Tracy's mother marry in the near future.Thus, when Tracy, at the urging of her mother, calls Brooke and they meet for the first time in Manhattan, Tracy finds herself willingly caught up in the cyclone of Brooke's life. Tracy even finds herself using Brooke as inspiration for her short story that she submits to the prestigious Mobius Literary Society at her college.All of this seems well and good, but for me the problem with the movie is in the dialogue, which often came across to me as mostly pretentious, whiny, and even mean-spirited at times. Thus, the characters that emerged were so shallow and self-absorbed that I mostly lost interest in what would happen to any of them. When that happens to me as I view a film, I start checking the time wondering when it will be finally over.Overall, Gerwig and Kirke are solid here, with many actors in supporting roles adding much as well. However, as mentioned the occasional clever or humorous line was overshadowed by dialogue that came across to me as affected and pretentious, leading to surfacy and shallow characters.

Another Noah Baumbach–Greta Gerwig comedy about fragile young New Yorkers whose reach exceeds their grasp. Greta's "Frances Ha" character has evolved from a homeless 20-something art girl to a cash-strapped 30-yr-old It girl, Brooke, who's mentoring a young disciple, a bummed-out college freshman, Tracy (Lola Kirke). Sly, self-possessed Tracy doesn't seem like she has much to learn from flamboyant, foolish Brooke, her stepsister-to-be, but she becomes her willing accomplice in a scheme to raise capital from a wealthy frenemy couple. As with the search for the missing dinosaur bone in "Bringing Up Baby," the plot requires a trip to Connecticut.This sets the scene for a brilliant screwball-comedy showdown, with seven characters on camera—including a nosy neighbor and a bookclub mom who's waiting for her ride—all emoting, pitching and backbiting in a modernist Greenwich mansion. The dialogue is fast and funny (for the most part), the line readings a little stagy at times; some of the wannabe epigrams are pretty lame, but that's okay because most of the characters aren't nearly as clever as they think they are. Brooke and Tracy's smug, self-conscious prattle may be annoying at first, but the perfect comedic pacing of the closing scenes makes it all worthwhile …As with Baumbach's previous film, "While We're Young," there's a dark side. The picture of young creatives feeding vampirically on each other's ideas and identities (like Adam Driver's character in the earlier film) seems a little overdrawn. On the other hand, the portrayal of ambitious, vaguely talented Brooke waiting around for some new project—a theme restaurant or an edgy T-shirt design—to catapult her into the leisure class suggests that 30-somethings haven't changed much since way back in the day.PS—Seems like as soon as you've thought of the name "Mamie-Claire," the script for this one pretty much writes itself… "Mistress America" is one of the few decent films, btw, that's currently available on Time Warner VOD