Carefree 29-year-old New Yorker Lola (Greta Gerwig) never expected to be dumped by her fiancé, Luke (Joel Kinnaman), just three weeks before their wedding. But here she is, manless, before the opening credits of Daryl Wein’s flimsy romantic comedy have even finished rolling. At first, the shock is all-consuming – Lola isn’t motivated enough to even feed herself a chip. But her scatterbrained perkiness (a Gerwig character hallmark) slowly returns as she reluctantly re-enters the dating pool.
You could call the shenanigans that ensue ‘mumblecore “Sex and the City”’, if the HBO series ‘Girls’ hadn’t already stolen Lola’s thunder on that front. Guffaw as our flighty heroine trolls downtown Manhattan bars with her snappy, saucy best friend (co-writer Zoe Lister-Jones). Cringe as her parents (an ill-used Bill Pullman and Debra Winger) offer up romantic advice that’s either far too intimate or generations out of date. Feel the suspense as she waffles over whether or not to take up with her ex’s hipster-musician best bud (Hamish Linklater)…
Gerwig is charming, considering the rote stuff she has to work with (she even very nearly manages to sell Lola’s climactic ‘This is, like, you know, what I’ve learned’ speech). Yet this still feels like a real step-down – hopefully short-lived – after her distinctively eccentric turns in ‘Greenberg’ and ‘Damsels in Distress’.