Plastics!

Tiny Furniture

Crit

Some time back I was given to understand that the term mumblecore had fallen into scorned desuetude, but it seems to be popping up again for this, and if the spiked heel doesn't fit very well and you wobble around self-consciously on it, . . .

Whatever else you call this, it is a tour de courage by 24-year-old Lena Dunham, who wrote, directed, and stars in this smart, funny, and loosely autobiographical tale of the most hopelessly unfocused recent college graduate since Benjamin Braddock, which, given the general demographic of mumblecore, is tall cotton. Aura, whose milieu, to the extent she has one, is the YouTube video, moves back in with her mother and younger sister, both of whom are vastly and unashamedly more accomplished artistically. Having put herself in such an emotionally unhealthy environment, what else is there for her to do but start and quit an awful job and crush on two worse boys, culminating in one of the ickiest episodes of consensual sex on film? And to top it off, Dunham films her own perfectly ordinary physique as mercilessly as any documentarian could have. Is it art, or just masochism? I don't care, because even the ugliness of this is beautiful.