Noah Baumbach, Kicking and Screaming Into Middle Age

Noah Baumbach’s first movie, “Kicking and Screaming,” from 1995, is about a group of guys, recent college graduates, who don’t want to leave college. Though bright, capable, and vaguely destined for greatness, they rent a house in their college town, hang out at the same bars, and refuse to confront the future, or much else. When a boy selling cookies comes to the door, Max (Chris Eigeman) makes everybody hit the deck, to hide; later, when he breaks a glass, he puts a sign on the shards that says “BROKEN GLASS.” They live in a comfortable, if self-loathing, purgatory, paralyzed in part by their own romanticism. “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday,” Max says. “I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur.” The women in their lives are readier to forge ahead and grow up; one tension is whether they’ll be brave enough to join them.