Watch this on Netflix: Noah Baumbach’s ‘Kicking and Screaming’
High school is a dominant setting for coming-of-age movies and television sitcoms abound in the struggles of 30-something urbanites, but the plight of those in their early 20s is something of a lost genre on screen. You could fill out a top 25 list of high school movies and still leave off a few classics, but for recent college graduates, there are just a few prominent entries: St. Elmo’s Fire, Reality Bites, and Kicking and Screaming, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this week.
Why does this uncertain period of life so rarely show up on film? Perhaps because the waywardness of this time period doesn’t really feel like anything, and Kicking and Screaming understands this well. “You know in a few hours I’m going to lose all identity?” Max (Chris Eigeman) says on graduation night. “Eight hours ago I was Max Belmont, English major, college senior. Now I am Max Belmont who does nothing.”
Max is right: he spends his postgraduate days doing the crossword puzzle and figuring out when it’s late enough to hit the bar. Meanwhile, Otis (Carlos Jacott) back out on graduate school to move back in with his parents, Skippy (Jason Wiles) re-enrolls in class, and Grover (Josh Hamilton), irked by his girlfriend Jane’s (Olivia d’Abo) decision to go to Prague instead of moving to Brooklyn with him, pursues undergraduate women instead of job prospects.
Kicking and Screaming was Noah Baumbach’s directorial debut; he was just 26 years old when he made the film, which he based on his time at Vassar College. From the opening scene, the blueprint for his distinct voice is apparent: witticisms and neurotic grumblings from fussy pseudo-intellectuals. It remains my favorite movie of his.
The fitfulness of youth suits Baumbach well. Films like The Squid and the Whale, The Meyerowitz Stories, and Marriage Story are well-crafted dramas, but the anxieties of Baumbach’s characters tend to get a bit more exhausting with age. Kicking and Screaming and Frances Ha are much more full of life, although they fall squarely on opposite sides of navigating the aimless 20s. Frances (Greta Gerwig, Baumbach’s better half) is ever-curious and incessantly trying to escape the rut she finds herself in. The men of Kicking and Screaming are far more depressed. The question of the film is not whether they will discover they are lost (they know that from the beginning), but whether they will just accept their newfound lack of identity as a condition of life.
Baumbach’s energetic writing, thankfully, keeps this exploration from becoming a chore. If the guys are going to be pathetic at least they are playfully pathetic together, and Kicking and Screaming is full of charming details that hold up 25 years later, such as the dejected roll calls about who masturbated that day, or Grover’s total lack of enthusiasm at the prospect of sex. They grow sick of themselves. Glass breaks in the guys’ house, and a paper sign covering the mess reading “BROKEN GLASS” becomes an apt metaphor: we know what we should be doing to resolve the situation, but this sounds a lot easier.
The women of the film, meanwhile, are much more well-adjusted than the men, another trope of Baumbach’s films. Miami, played by the incomparable Parker Posey, is on track to finish up her final year of school and maintains a rightfully condescending stance on the mens’ codependence. “You guys all talk the same,” she tells them. “You guys are all in love with each other.”
We only see Jane in flashbacks after the first scene of the film, but she leaves unanswered voicemails for Grover about her time in Prague. He could have gone with her, but chose to remain rudderless. Kate (Cara Buono) is also supposed to fit into this contrast, but she is 16 years old, and the mens’ infatuation with her, cosigned by Baumbach’s script, is the most disappointing part of the film.
The guys are governed by an unmistakable Gen X ethos, that doing things is silly because we already basically know what is going to happen. “Oh, I’ve been to Prague,” Grover tells Jane. “Well I haven’t ‘been to Prague’ been to Prague, but I know that thing. That stop shaving your armpits, read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, fall in love with a sculptor, now I realize how bad American coffee is thing.”
Baumbach elevates this pessimism with a splash of heart: the flashbacks with Jane and Grover are as close as he gets to outright romanticism. When Jane calls from Prague, she remarks that she can’t believe how bad American coffee is. Grover thinks he already knows this, but she’s actually experiencing it while Grover is galavanting with undergraduates. Kicking and Screaming isn’t totally cynical: the early 20s might seem like a meaningless time in life, but at a certain point you just have to do something.
A millennial or Gen Z iteration of Kicking and Screaming would have a much different attitude, paradoxically more earnest and more pessimistic about the future, and a lot more online. Girls probably hews closest, but there hasn’t really been anything like Baumbach’s feature on the big screen in recent years. Part of that stems from the migration of these stories to television, led by more diverse voices, and it might ultimately be a good thing we haven’t replicated Kicking and Screaming; we don’t need another group of white 20-somethings striving to define the ennui of a generation. But the biggest compliment I can pay Kicking and Screaming is to say that we could use a new version, perhaps not by copying its template, but by modeling after its aimless spirit.