Mistress America

Mistress America (2015) is Noah Baumbach's screwball comedy, ready to watch online on iFILM. Tracy, a lonely college freshman in New York, calls her soon-to-be stepsister Brooke on a whim. What follows is a few weeks that upend everything she thought her city would be.

Brooke, played by Greta Gerwig, juggles a dozen half-finished dreams at once: a restaurant she swears will open, a spin class she teaches, an old grudge she can't drop. Tracy (Lola Kirke) trails after her, dazzled, and quietly mines the friendship for a short story she won't admit she's writing. The dialogue comes fast and overlapping. Midway through, the whole thing decamps to a Connecticut house and turns into an almost stage-farce, doors swinging and guests piling up.

Baumbach and Gerwig wrote it together, and you can hear how much they adore and needle these women in the same breath. It's a film about how a magnetic person who can't get anything done still pulls everyone into her orbit. Smart, quick, and sneakily sad. Stream Mistress America (2015) online on iFILM.