Mumblecore!: Generation IM Discovers Its Navel

First, the 16 mm New Wave; then the Super-8 No Wave; and now, an American film movement, based on DV, with a name that might belong to one of Harry Potter's friends: It's Mumblecore!

Not much movie magic here: A recent college grad casually breaks up with her boyfriend, has a brief office affair, and then embarks upon another. At one point, she goes on location to the beach; in the big emotional scene, she tearfully confesses to suffering from "chronic dissatisfaction." Hannah Takes the Stairs, the third feature by 26-year-old Joe Swanberg, is something like the Mumblecore equivalent of Gone With the Wind.

Hannah arrives here on Sept. 28 to conclude this Mumble Without a Cause festival of three micro-indie New Talkies (aka Generation DIY, aka Cine Slackavetes, aka MySpace Neorealism, aka Mumblecore), a movement that coalesced two years ago when Andrew Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation, Swanberg's Kissing on the Mouth (a response, he's said, to Bujalski's 2002 Funny Ha Ha), and the Duplass Brothers' The Puffy Chair premiered at South by Southwest; over the next 18 months, these homemade, low-key comedy-dramas of twentysomething angst, along with related films like Aaron Katz's Dance Party, USA (a comedy-drama about teen-something angst), began turning up, while critical fave Funny Ha Ha achieved something like cult status.

Funny Ha Ha, which played Seattle two years ago, established the template. Set in a postgraduate milieu, it drew heavily on Bujalski's college confreres, using nonprofessionals to portray a small galaxy of awkwardly diffident young people—the most obnoxious loser played by the filmmaker. While following Bujalski's lead in constructing narrative and characterization out of constant chatter and a succession of uninflected moments, subsequent Mumblecormedies eschewed 16 mm for DV, became even more doc-like (most are half shot in close-up), and presented themselves as collectively scripted enterprises, with cast and crew often identical. According to Swanberg, everyone shared the same Chicago apartment during the making of Hannah Takes the Stairs.

Typically running a compact 80 minutes, these movies are disarmingly pragmatic, full of abrupt cuts and choppy inserts. Acting is mainly a coping mechanism. The characters in Hannah alternate between unconscious and self-conscious, and that's the charm. Embarrassment rules: In one typical interaction, Hannah (Greta Gerwig) contrives to have her ostensive boss (the ever-creepy Bujalski) come up to her cramped apartment where, squeezed in with her roommate on the couch, she fixes him with her pale hazel eyes and asks, "Do you think I'm doing OK at work?"

Thriving on the modest truth of clumsy mishaps and incoherent riffs, fueled by a combination of narcissism and diffidence, Mumblecore reflects sensibilities formed by The Real World (our life is a movie) and Seinfeld (constant discourse), as well as The Blair Witch Project (DIY plus Internet). Of course, Mumblecorps members prefer to cite Dogma or Gus Van Sant, who cast his upcoming mega-Mumble Paranoid Park through MySpace. That the filmmakers often appear on-screen gives their movies a psychodramatic edge. In his youthful Flesh of Morning, Stan Brakhage made a self-starring poem on masturbation; half a century later in Kissing on the Mouth, Swanberg presents himself ejaculating in the shower and brazenly flirts with porn. Kissing opens with its heroine (Kate Winterich) and her ex-boyfriend engaged in startlingly naturalistic intercourse—the movie's premise is her inability to give up these afternoon trysts, much to the discomfort of an adoring male roommate (Swanberg).

The denizens of Mumblecordia are often failed musicians or would-be writers. Joblessness is rife. Hannah refers to her boyfriend's newly unemployed status as "the step up of him pursuing nothing." Without apparent work or ambition (other than to appear in this movie), Kissing's protagonist is the quintessential Swanberg character. In his 2006, largely improvised follow-up, LOL, three guys are more involved with various cyber-relations than with any human at hand.

Swanberg maps a system based on cell phones, instant messaging, Web sites (with Kissing's Winterich self-reflexively playing an Internet sex symbol), and YouTube, to suggest a virtual world more compelling than the real one. Reviewing LOL sympathetically last summer in The New York Times, Nathan Lee noted that "the impact of technology on social relations has received subtler analysis elsewhere (see the films of David Cronenberg.)" True enough, but Swanberg's satire might be better appreciated as a critique of the fanboy fantasy world celebrated by Judd Apatow.

Mumblecore is demographically self-contained. Straight, white, middle class. The movies suggest college, without the course load. There are almost no grown-ups—which is to say anyone over 30. One exception is The Puffy Chair (seen here last Labor Day), a road movie in which the foundering Josh (played by co-director Mark Duplass, currently in town to act in another movie) sets off with his needy girlfriend to present his dad with an eBay-purchased simulacrum of a La-Z-Boy recliner he once enjoyed. Their casually ludicrous misadventures, most involving two-dimensional authority figures, are compounded once Josh's neo-hippie brother joins the expedition that, in essence, strips the upholstery off the couple's comfy, dysfunctional relationship.