This is the kind of thing that can quite easily become an insufferable mess. Quarter-life crisis stories, with angsty twenty-somethings trying to figure out just who they’re going to be now that all the externally imposed structure has suddenly vanished from their lives, can easily become self-indulgent exercises in solipsism. In the premise for her second feature, Tiny Furniture, writer/director Lena Dunham practically sets herself up for just such an exercise: the young director, a recent film school grad herself, casts herself as Aura, also a recent film school grad, just moved back into her old room in the Tribeca apartment where her artist mother and high school student sister live. The self-reference goes even deeper, though, since the actors who play Aura’s mother and sister are Dunham’s actual mother and sister, and the apartment that serves as the set for the film isn’t just a set: it’s their actual apartment.
What saves the movie is the fact that Dunham is genuinely, effortlessly funny — just self-deprecating enough for the real-life parallels not to feel like a vanity project, but not so much so that it seems like she’s knocking herself down just to play on our sympathies. It’s got the spirit and some of the rhythms of mumblecore, the small, low-budget DIY film movement that generally focuses on similar themes, but Dunham’s writing feels sharper and much more focused than the often ramshackle improvisations that cripple many of those films.
The movie opens as Aura returns to New York from Ohio after her last semester at Oberlin College, with a brand new cinema studies degree, and little else on her resume apart from some class film projects up on YouTube with a handful of views. The comments on those videos aren’t very complimentary: they mainly make fat jokes at her expense. She’s got no idea what she wants to do, but knows she needs to find a job so that she and her best friend from school, Frankie (Merritt Wever), can get a Brooklyn apartment after Frankie finishes a summer research project back in Ohio and joins her in the city.
