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Put aside, if you can, the preposterous cloud of hype on which Lena Dunham’s first feature arrives. Forget the New Yorker profile, the Fresh Air interview, the development deal with Judd Apatow, and look at the film, and what you’ll see is a mildly ambitious, tonally uneven and occasionally inspired portrait of a young woman muscling her way into adult life. Fresh out of college, Aura (Dunham) makes an awkward return to spacious Manhattan loft owned by her mother, a successful artist, where her bratty younger sister bristles at giving up her “special room.” That Aura’s mother and sister are played by Dunham’s mother and sister (Laurie Simmons and Grace Dunham) is less revealing than the cavernous white-on-white space in which they live, a monument to privileged minimalism that lays Dunham’s haute-bourgeois cards on the molded plastic table. Dunham doubles up on the Kubrickian chill by shooting in widescreen; when she and her sister talk through the wall of their adjacent rooms, they’re shot as if they’re in a dollhouse with the wall pulled away, each pressed against the edge of her own little box. But while her observer’s eye is acute, Dunham doesn’t have much insight into her characters. They’re sharply drawn, but they’re all edges. —Sam Adams

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Rating:	No Rating
Director:	Lena Dunham
Cast:	Lena Dunham, Laurie Simmons, Grace Dunham, David Call, Alex Karpovsky, Jemima Kirke, Merritt Wever, Sarah Sophie Flicker, Amy Seimetz, Garland Hunter
Release Date:	November 12, 2010 (NY), November 26, 2010 (LA)
Running Time:	98
Distributor:	IFC
Genre:	Comedy