When You Finish Saving the World (2022 | USA | 84 minutes | Jesse Eisenberg)
There comes a time in every young actor’s life when he must graduate from playing the type of roles that made him famous and start directing other actors in the type of roles that made him famous. Here, in the Sundance premiere of his directorial debut, Jesse Eisenberg casts Finn Wolfhard in a Very Jesse Eisenberg Role — a precocious teen who attempts to mask soul-crushing insecurity under a thick coat of boastful bravado — as Ziggy Katz, a semi-successful TikTok Teen whose alternative-influenced emo folk music has earned him 20,000 followers on a verified top-performing account, but isn’t “political enough” to win the affections of a deeply-engaged, highly-informed girl at school who’s barely aware of his existence.
Just as he hides in his room behind a literal flashing siren (that works to ward off parental interruptions during livestreaming or … other activities demanding privacy), his mother has thrown herself into her work running a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. A dowdy Julianne Moore, with small gold-rimmed glasses and the loose-fitting natural fibers of a woman of certain age and temperment, might initially seem like her skinny-jeans and flashy self-promotional apparel-wearing son. But, in Very American Independent Film tradition, they’re really just flip sides of the same self-obsessed coin.
She’s formed her whole identity from the important work that she does to help others; he derives all of his self worth from the “likes” and “tips” of complete strangers. She can barely bring herself to say happy birthday to a co-worker whose party she learns about only because she stops in to scold them about being too loud; he has one friend at school, but is largely invisible to his earthbound classmates despite the flash of his daily wardrobe decisions. At home, their lives barely intersect, a point driven painfully home by the way that beanpole Wolfhard can barely even fit into Moore’s comically small SmartCar.
It’s a tragically cute setup, and Eisenberg uses it to send them bumbling through parallel journeys to find surrogates for each other. Moore creates a character whose well-meaning, if quietly deranged and oblivious, energies are focused on improving the life of a too-good-to-be-true teen at the shelter, whose emotional empathy and academic curiosity are the polar opposite of her son’s. Wolfhard brings a sense of confused and determined vulnerability to a guy who earnestly believes the world would be a lot better if everyone would just chill out and listen to music, yet likes a girl enough to dive awkwardly headlong into Indiana’s most aggressively liberal underage open mic club.
Shot on celluloid to look like a faded polaroid and with dueling scores by Emile Mosseri (The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Minari), the film has a timelessly nostalgic feel while still gently skewering the present moment. Both mother and son (and his music) are just cringeworthy enough to be funny, but are so empathetically rendered that you hope that they’ll figure out that each are rushing headlong in the wrong direction before it’s too late.
When You Finish Saving the World premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; it has a second festival showing later this week and is expected to be released later this year by A24.