Poetic License review – Apatow family affair ends up as warm and funny comedy

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One could cynically look at the credits for the film Poetic License and dismiss it outright. It was directed by Maude Apatow, daughter of Judd, and stars, among others, Apatow’s mother, Leslie Mann, Cooper Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour Hoffman), and Nico Parker (daughter of Thandiwe Newton and film-maker Ol Parker). On paper it all looks like a make-work project to keep the well-connected busy and creatively fulfilled. But the film itself – Apatow’s debut – is rich and lively enough to make none of the nepo stuff really matter.

Written by Raffi Donatich, Poetic License concerns a family who have moved from Chicago to a sleepy university town where economist James (Cliff “Method Man” Smith), has secured a plum professorship. He’s busy getting started, which leaves his wife Liz (Mann) a bit lonely and unmoored in her new life. Making matters worse is the inevitable drifting away of her high school-senior daughter, Dora (Parker), whose effort to make friends at her new school means she has to spend a little less time with mom. Liz is prone to a little risk, and so when two college boys, Sam and Ari, who are in the poetry class she’s auditing begin soliciting a friendship, she throws caution to the wind and accepts.

It’s a cute setup, faintly reminiscent of the social complications of a Nicole Holofcener film (particularly 2013’s note-perfect Enough Said). Donatich’s script is a little less brainy, but there are enough witty observations about human foibles and needs to bring to mind Holofcener, a master of the form. There are also traces of Apatow the elder ribboning through the film, an improvisatory vibe that keeps things loose and, at times, a little baggy. Creating such a natural, lived-in texture is a tricky feat for any film-maker, let alone a first timer, so credit is due to Apatow the younger, known as an actor in TV’s Euphoria, for so deftly finding the film’s warm, inviting cadence.

That would probably have been a far more difficult task with the wrong actors. But Apatow has cast smartly. Of course, she already knew that her mother is quite capable of playing Liz’s jumble of earthy empathy and daffy neuroticism. But she also deftly corrals Hoffman’s flurry of idiosyncrasies. And she helps Andrew Barth Feldman, who plays the other boy barging into Liz’s life, expand on the endearingly twitchy energy he showed in such spades in 2023’s No Hard Feelings. The three have a sparking, complementary chemistry, bouncing off of each other’s energy in endlessly appealing and amusing fashion.

There could be a far darker, more psychosexual take on a story like this, but Poetic License mostly wants to take it easy. The boys do, of course, each develop crushes on Liz, and some mild calamity ensues. But Apatow and Donatich choose to see the sweetness in that, rather than delving into the unseemly implications of that dawning love and lust. They do inch the film toward that third rail on occasion, though, moments of giddy bluntness that go a long way in preventing the niceness of the movie from becoming cloying.

Unlike the unsettlingly slavish devotion that Hallie Meyers-Shyer showed to her director parent, Nancy, in her first film, Home Again, Apatow maintains at least some distance from her father’s signature style. The influence is clearly there, and the film does drag on perhaps just a shade too long, as much of Judd Apatow’s work does. But Poetic License is far from mere pastiche. It has a distinct, youthful sensibility and sources its comedy more from recognisably human behaviour than from profane, one-liner riffing.

Still, it is quite the family affair, daughter directing mother in a story partly about a mother and a daughter struggling to grow together and on their own. One hopes the experience was more pleasant than anything else; not everyone could survive taking direction from their child, or giving it to their parent. Whatever the arrangements or understandings were on set, one doesn’t feel a sense of carefully managed compromise in the final product. Poetic License would probably play well to someone who has no idea who the Apatows are.

After all, Mann is only one part of the triumvirate leading the film. Apatow allows plenty of room for Feldman and Cooper to make the movie their own, an opportunity they seize with winsome aplomb. It’s easy to see why Sam and Ari fall for caring, empathic, erratic Liz. But Cooper and Feldman have so much offbeat charm that one does wonder why Liz isn’t, way down deep, perhaps equally smitten. It would be the cutest kind of taboo.