Noah Baumbach's While We're Young deals with resisting maturity

Twin themes - the struggle to grow up and the reluctance to do so - lie at the heart of Noah Baumbach's work. It's a conflict that first manifested itself in 1995, with the then-26-year old filmmaker's debut, , a smarty-pants look at a group of post-college pals who can't seem to get out of first gear.

Baumbach describes his artistic vision as a kind of hindsight. "I remember talking to a friend of mine, and we were referring to a past experience we both had. He said suddenly: 'Well, I was so depressed then.' I remember thinking: 'You never talked about it then.' It was something that he was only just coming to terms with." All of his work, the filmmaker says, is an effort to dramatise the "drip-drip" nature of experience, in which breakthroughs come slowly and are often late, if they arrive at all.

Never has the elusive nature of maturity seemed quite so slippery as in . Considering that its stars (Ben Stiller, 49, and Naomi Watts, 46) are no spring chickens, the film's very title offers a sardonic commentary on time and those who choose to march to the beat of a different drum.

The film centres on New Yorkers Josh and Cornelia, a married couple in their 40s who are in denial about encroaching middle age. When they meet Jamie and Darby, millennial hipsters played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried, the inter-generational friendship briefly rejuvenates the older protagonists.

Baumbach's dialogue is typically wry. "I remember when this song was just considered bad," Josh tells Jamie, who's listening to on giant headphones and wearing a "kiss the chef" apron while barbecuing on a Brooklyn sidewalk.