Are you aged between 30 and 50? You’ll enjoy While We’re Young. Everybody else need not apply.

Coming of age comedies were all well and good and very cute and funny until you suddenly find yourself in one of the age brackets being pigeonholed into a brutal little charactature and then they start getting very, very personal and uncomfortable. It’s a good thing then, that writer/director Noah Baumbach’s (The Squid and The Whale) new film While We’re Young is tactful in it’s approach and even more commendable in it’s casting.

Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller are childless and in their mid 40s and are totally enamoured by their new twenty-something friends (Amanda Seyfried and Adam Driver) who seem infinitely more interesting than their other old, shit mates who have a sprog now consuming their every thought. More than anything else While We’re Young is a very accurate analysis of that feeling of being at a crossroads in your life and looking longingly at everyone else around you, hoping that their choices might offer you some kind of Cliff’s Notes on how to be better, cooler and ultimately more fulfilled.

“For the first time in my life I’ve stopped thinking of myself as a child imitating an adult” – Josh Srebnick

Unsurprisingly, the conclusion is that we’re all on our own bumpy paths, to navigate on our lonesome, at our own peril. It doesn’t really offer you any solace except in realising that the struggle is real and one that’s shared with everyone (uh, between 30 and 50). Unsurprisingly Adam Driver is perfect in his role as the ultimate hipster documentarian, and Adam Horovitz (yes, of The Beastie Boys) is a bit of a revelation as Fletcher, the new, awkward 40-something dad. The New York City streetscapes go alright too. High recommended.

While We’re Young was released to Australian cinemas in mid-April and still screening at select cinemas now.