Tiny Furniture

Made on a shoestring budget in her family's gleamingly white Manhattan loft, writer and director Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture is a savvy filmmaking debut that's both infuriating and insightful. Dunham recruited her mother, fine art photographer Laurie Simmons, and her younger sister, Grace, to play fictionalized versions of themselves in an episodic story centered on Aura (Dunham), a college grad adrift in uncertainty and anxiety. She deals with the stress of facing down the rest of her life by partying with her flighty best friend, Charlotte (a hilariously debauched Jemima Kirke), and housing Jed (Alex Karpovsky), a freeloading YouTube celebrity. Aura, who is often combative and prone to teenage histrionics—especially in a key scene with her mother, which feels slightly contrived—is a fascinatingly relatable character that's still frequently hard to root for. A romantic subplot that involves the nebbishy Jed and Aura's roguishly charming co-worker (David Call) is depressing and complex, like most twentysomething romances. In keeping with the loosely autobiographical story, there's an easy naturalism to Dunham's camerawork, which shows off her eye for strikingly composed scenes, and her warts-and-all acting style. For Aura, being 22 and not knowing what you want to do with your life isn't easy, but Dunham's confident first film is a sign that she has it all figured out.