Comic, Zany but Unsettling, Too

Noah Baumbach has changed, at least a little. The man who made the acidic but insightful “The Squid and the Whale,” who gave us “Greenberg,” a character so unlikable that we almost wanted him to fail, now gives us what, for him, passes as comedy. And to be sure, there is a mindless, zany streak running through his newest film, “Mistress America.” But there is also a palpable anxiety.

Baumbach is a quintessential New York director. The energy and self-satisfaction of the city inform his movies — people spin madly in exercise classes, dance wildly in clubs, hurtle into each other on crowded streets — as do the creative people whose dreams he loves to portray, then puncture. After all, what’s a dream worth on the market? Nothing, Baumbach suggests.

Enter Greta Gerwig. She and Baumbach began their romantic and collaborative relationship in 2011 and cowrote “Frances Ha,” his first comedy, in 2012. Now the couple has written “Mistress America” for Gerwig. She plays Brooke, a 32-year-old city gadabout who talks non-stop, knows hundreds of people but refuses to network, and has zillions of schemes for businesses to give her the security she knows she is going to need soon. Along comes 18-year-old Tracy (Lola Kirke), a freshman at a Barnard-like college whose father is going to marry Brooke’s mother. Tracy is dazzled by Brooke: instant sisterhood, instant hero worship.

Tracy is a lonely but very smart cookie, who has been rejected by a prospective boyfriend and by the school literary society, which is hilariously satirized by Gerwig (who graduated from Barnard) and Baumbach. As she spends more and more time with Brooke, Tracy understands that Brooke’s latest scheme — Mom’s: a homey  restaurant for the hippest of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to hang out — is bound to fail. But Tracy also realizes that Brooke is a subject worth writing about, and she begins to do so surreptitiously, ultimately raising questions about artistic ethics. 

Sure enough Brooke’s backer pulls out, and she goes to Greenwich in search of $75,000 from an ex-boyfriend and an ex-roommate, who stole and married the boyfriend, stole Brooke’s cats and, as she herself willingly admits, stole Brooke’s idea for a line of T-shirts that has made mega bucks. The movie shifts smoothly from comedy to farce, the kind Claudette Colbert and Jean Arthur did so well in the 1930s. And mayhem in Greenwich is something to behold, though suspension of disbelief is advised.

Gerwig is the shining center of “Mistress America.” Even if her cheerfulness can seem forced and her strangeness a bit mannered, she is fascinating. You root for her even when she is at her looniest and  don’t much like it when the movie doesn’t treat her well. Kirke gives Tracy an open-eyed intelligence and a worldliness far beyond the character’s 18 years (Kirke is 24.) As Mamie-Claire, Brooke’s ex-roommate, Heather Lind is nasty and mean, but then her husband, Dylan, played by Michael Chernus, is a two-faced hedge fund guy who smiles at Brooke as he bursts her dream bubble.

Of course Baumbach still focuses on failure as the definition of a person. Left on his own again, I suspect he would give us more stories of unfulfilled dreams, of unfulfilled promise, as evidence of unfulfilled lives. But Gerwig softens this. We remember her radiance, her energy, even her kookie and endearing dreams. They were enough for her for awhile, and they are enough for us now.

“Mistress America” is playing widely. It is rated R.