88 min | R | January 20, 2023 | A24
A teenage folk singer broadcasts to his online fans while his mother runs a shelter for domestic violence survivors. Neither one can hear anyone but themselves. Jesse Eisenberg made a comedy about narcissism and forgot to make anyone likable, which turns out to be the point.
Evelyn runs a shelter for survivors of domestic abuse. Her son Ziggy performs original folk songs for twenty thousand strangers who pay to watch him livestream from his bedroom. They live in the same house and cannot reach each other across a hallway. Evelyn fixates on a quiet teenager named Kyle who passes through the shelter and decides to mold him into the son she wants. Ziggy chases a politically engaged classmate named Lila and tries to write protest music to impress her. The film is about two people who mistake their own performances of virtue for the real thing.
Julianne Moore plays Evelyn as a woman whose compassion runs cold. She speaks to the families in her shelter with rehearsed warmth and treats her own son with open contempt. Moore lets the cruelty leak out in small moments, like a tight smile that drops the instant a conversation stops serving her. Finn Wolfhard plays Ziggy with a teenager’s total self-absorption and a performer’s reflexive charm. He delivers the cringe of a boy who confuses his follower count for moral worth without ever begging for sympathy. Alisha Boe plays Lila with a steadiness that exposes how shallow Ziggy’s borrowed politics are.
Jesse Eisenberg writes and directs his first feature, and it carries the cadence of his own screen persona. The dialogue overlaps and stammers and circles back on itself, and Eisenberg stages the mother and son in separate framings even when they share a room. The camera keeps them boxed in doorways and reflected in screens, so the house reads as two sealed chambers. The musical sequences shoot Ziggy in the flat, bright light of his streaming setup, which turns his sincerity into product. Eisenberg trusts silence and lets awkward exchanges run past the point of comfort.
This is a small, precise film about people who perform goodness because they cannot feel it. Evelyn and Ziggy are difficult to like by design, and the film refuses to soften them into a tidy reconciliation. The risk is that the satire stays at arm’s length and the characters never quite break through their own surfaces. Eisenberg understands the disease he is diagnosing because he shares its symptoms, and that recognition gives the film its bite. It is a sharp debut from a director who knows exactly how insufferable his subjects are.