Best Gen X Movie Ever

And the Oscar goes to ...

Hands down, it's Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach's 1995 film about the lives of a group of friends in the year after they all graduate from college. The movie's title refers to the manner in which they are entering the "real world," and the plot revolves around each of their individual struggles. The central plotline concerns the main character, Grover (played by Josh Hamilton), who is trapped in a sort of emotional limbo after his girlfriend Jane (Olivia D'Abo) moves to Prague.

I know there are other movies that aspire to the title of greatest Gen X film. Probably the first one that was talked about in this way (or at least the first one I remember) was Reality Bites. Not even close, in my book. Reality Bites came out the year I graduated from high school (1994), at exactly the age I should have liked a movie like that. But even then I remember thinking that it seemed contrived. It felt like a movie that was self-consciously trying to evoke the experience of a generation, like St. Elmo's Fire for people ten years younger (only not nearly as good).

Another truly good Gen X movie is the more recent Garden State (2004),written and directed by Zach Braff (who, like Baumbach in Kicking and Screaming, was making his first movie). I liked Garden State. I even heard a Baby Boomer bishop (Scott Jones) refer to it in a speech at annual conference a couple of years back, as a good movie for boomers to watch if they want to get a handle on the emotional paralysis and spiritual emptiness that many Gen X'ers experience. But for me, Garden State came a little too late. By the time I saw it on DVD, I had already come through the woods of that mid-20s identity crisis that so many of us go through.

On the other hand, I watched Kicking and Screaming during the summer after I graduated from college in 1998. Talk about timing. I've been told that it is a "guys' movie," and that is probably true. But it's still a good flick.

Anyway, check it out. It became available recently in a Criterion Collection edition, which you can order from Amazon. There are some great extras on the DVD, with the best being a series of 2006 interviews between Baumbach and many of the principals in the cast as they look back on the experience of making the movie. I think Baumbach must have answered a lot of questions about his film as embodying the Generation X experience, because he alludes to Gen X stuff several times in the interviews (often seeming a little uncomfortable with the connection).

Ultimately, it is just a really good movie with a really good cast. It is dialogue-driven, but the script is good enough to keep the movie going without getting bogged down in wordiness. It has some genuinely funny moments. And like I said, for Gen X'ers an awful lot of it will hit close to home.

(Warning: This post refers to a movie that is rated "R," so viewers should be aware of that. Sorry, I should have mentioned that before.)