Critics reviews

It isn't merely about literature; it's a work of brilliant writing, one of the most exquisite of recent screenplays. While watching the film, I wanted to transcribe the dialogue in real time for the pleasure of reading it afterward (and I hope that the screenplay, which Gerwig and Baumbach co-wrote, will be published as a book). The center of its writerly wonder is Brooke's wild verbal whimsy.

Like While We're Young, Baumbach's latest seems to be a film of low stakes and minor ambition, yet its execution is far more satisfying. With almost endlessly quotable dialogue, two truly winning lead performances and an energetic score, Mistress America is yet another comedic triumph from the creative partnership of Baumbach and Gerwig.

For anyone who's wondered how one of Luis Buñuel's bourgeois farces might go in English, it's probably something like these scenes in Connecticut. This American version is comparably restrained. No one dies, for instance. This is Baumbach and Gerwig's third film together. To quote Tracy to Tony: This new movie's "just the same in another direction" — with much funnier dialogue and evocative electronic music by Wareham and Britta Phillips.

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.

Even if the film builds to a shrug, Baumbach is working at an increasingly sophisticated craft and dialogue level from moment to moment. Endless amounts of near-uniformly quotable dialogue come out at a clip only a shorthand writer could keep pace with. Respites are rare, but that doesn't mean shot composition and movement haven't been carefully considered.

Mistress America is a very funny and observant movie, albeit squirm-inducing, with endlessly quotable dialogue. "X doesn't roll like that," Brooke tells a student that she's tutoring in math, "because X can't be pinned down." The movie starts to crater as soon as Brooke and Tracy and company end up at the fantastically beautiful modernist house where Dylan and Mamie Clare live.

Because the movie rattles past at a sharp clip (it's a lean 84 minutes), it pulls along a raft of ideas that, like Brooke's madcap schemes, aren't always followed through. Generational envy between the different tiers of youth and the nagging fear of having missed the boat are left hanging.

The crescendo proceeds as expected but the joy lies in the orchestration. Baumbach times his choreographed comic collisions with the snap and crackle of vintage Hollywood farce, with Gerwig as the gloriously humanising centre of the chaos — she's as magnetic when mugging through an impromptu rock number as she is when the mask finally drops.

It's a funny film, but one of those funny films where your brain will be telling you that what you're watching is funny, but will refuse to fire the synapses that would duly evoke a physical response. It offers a brand of humour that results in an internal gesture of wry acknowledgement rather than actual honest-to-goodness laughing.

Brooke's disaster-prone air is attractive, both to Tracy and us, because of the sheer charisma of Gerwig – she's bossier, and pretends to be surer of herself, but there's no floor under Brooke to support all these projects she's dreaming up. You can see why Tracy wants to make her the tragicomic heroine of her newest literary effort, but she holds on to this as a dirty little secret, and the film starts to buckle, at the halfway point, from the weight of carrying it around.

Mistress America is above all else a movie about the kind of friendship between two women that, despite its brevity, will reverberate for years. Gerwig and Kirke's performances go beyond words and gestures, making us aware of the characters' inner fantasies of self and other. The movie is unimaginable without them.

The lapidary one-liners of a Baumbach film always help in putting hilarious captions on character and action, but more than ever it's the moxie of Gerwig, who wrote the screenplay with Baumbach, that pushes through a wonderfully unpredictable personality that's at once familiar and strange, a striver for whom the film is constantly and fascinatingly selecting its cues on how to view her.