When last we saw George Miller, it was in the sun-blasted desert of Fury Road for a breathless post-apocalyptic hyper-saturated revolutionary adventure. But aside from his forays into the Mad Max mythology, his oeuvre also includes two movies about dancing penguins, another pair about talking piglets, and a dark adult fairy tale concerning three suburban witches. So, seven years after his chaotic masterpiece, we shouldn’t be too surprised that his return to big screens is less an action spectacle than a return to the realm of storybook fables.

Is there any sadder fate than being the last (rich) white man in Brooklyn without a hit podcast? Sure, Ben Manalowitz (B.J. Novak) has a plum job at the New Yorker (not New York magazine), a huge apartment with a view, no shortage of rooftop party invites, and a phone that’s constantly blowing up with messages from the half-dozen women he’s simultaneously casually “dating”. But he (feels that he) has (somewhat incongruously given his actual job) no platform by which to prattle his ideas about the true source of America’s divisions — not by geography or politics, but by asynchrony and self-curation — into the ears of millions of captive listeners. Such is the central challenge facing Ben in Novak’s debut as a feature film director.