A stressed-out first-time author has unexpected lessons to learn when she is invited to speak at her alma mater
Film-maker and
Actor Kris Rey is the cream of the mumblecore generation. Her 2009 debut about young Americans travelling and looking for new experiences in Costa Rica deserves attention simply due to its genius title: It Was Great, But I Was Ready to Come Home. Now she has made a beguiling
comedy of manners: exquisitely awkward and painful, but also with a lovably broad streak of farcical absurdity.
Gillian Jacobs is Kate, a thirtysomething woman who is intensely stressed because her first novel has just been published and also because her relationship has collapsed. In this crisis of self-belief, she is flatteringly invited to return to her old college to give a reading and meet students – the invitation coming from her creepy (and married) former creative-writing professor David, tremendously played by Jemaine Clement. She once had a crush on him, and his clearly unaltered interest in her is now queasily complicated by his starstruck reverence for her career, which has outpaced his.