Toronto Film Festival: While We're Young starring Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts and Amanda Seyfried: 'funny, observant and truth-telling'

Noah Baumbach's freewheeling film Frances Ha, starring his partner Greta Gerwig as a twentysomething trying to grow up a little, was one of the hits at last year's festival in Toronto. He's making films in which people recognise their own generation. While We're Young moves the story on.

Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) are a childless couple heading into disappointing middle-age — “What’s the opposite of the world’s your oyster?” — while all their friends have babies. He’s a stalled documentary-maker, she’s a producer for her famous father, another film-maker. They meet a cool couple in their twenties, Jamie (Adam Driver, so ubiquitous just now), a would-be director too, and artisan ice-cream maker Darby (Amanda Seyfried), and they try to rejuvenate themselves by copying their new young friends.

Josh gets a boho hat and rides a bike. Cornelia starts dancing to hip-hop. Together they go to a shamanic evening with hallucinogenic drugs and induced vomiting.

Josh and Cornelia even collaborate with Jamie on his documentary project, a film that looks much more promising than the grim tract about power in America that Josh has been trying to finish for 10 years. Josh finds the younger man’s success hard to take. Jamie may not be the innocent hipster he seems — endlessly exclaiming “Jeez, Louise!” in a fun way and giving praying hands thanks for benefits received — but Josh's bitter attempts to expose him disgrace only himself. While We’re Young is funny, observant and truth-telling, thoroughly enjoyable in short: in his own medium, Baumbach is as good a novelist as America has right now.

A couple of years ago Cheryl Strayed published Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found, a memoir of the 1,000-mile hike she made along the US west coast in the hope of putting her life back on track after the death of her mother, the end of her marriage and a descent into drug abuse and unrewarding promiscuity.

The Toronto Film Festival runs until Sunday.