Brooke is a New York spin-class instructor who plans to open a restaurant that will also be a hair salon and a community center, and furthermore has an idea for a TV show called Mistress America. This sort of aspirational multi-tasking is also characteristic of the movie that shares the name of the imaginary TV program: It’s a contemporary Gen-Y satire, a throwback screwball comedy, and a notebook of random jottings by writer-director Noah Baumbach and writer-star Greta Gerwig, all stuffed into 84 minutes.
Gerwig, of course, plays Brooke, who is in some ways similar to the character she and Baumbach created for their previous collaboration, Frances Ha. But Brooke is not this film’s central character. It’s Tracy (Lola Kirke), a Barnard freshman who’s quickly adopted and then abandoned by Brooke.
The college student also has goals. She wants to be a writer, but her first submission to the college literary society is ignored. In Brooke, Tracy sees the material for a fictional breakthrough. So she begins a short story, also titled Mistress America. This text is written overnight, and becomes an issue between the two sisters-to-be almost immediately. None of the movie’s developments is given a moment to breathe.
That quickness is a hindrance to Mistress America, in which relationships develop and decay at a pace that rivals Gerwig’s speedy delivery of the overly theatrical lines. The movie’s stilted centerpiece is a ’30s-Hollywood-style roundelay at a Connecticut mansion where Brooke has traveled to make a desperate financial pitch for her zeitgeist-defining eatery. She’s accompanied by Tracy and two of her classmates, and ultimately the crowd grows to eight chattering actors — including a cameo by soundtrack co-composer Dean Wareham, who also had a small part in Baumbach’s While We’re Young earlier this year.