"I'm writing 'young and gifted' in my autobiography," goes an old Sloan song. "I figured who would know better than me?" They're lyrics I found myself humming after watching Tiny Furniture, 23-year-old Lena Dunham's breakout triple threat, a time-lapse snapshot of young, wannabe womanhood in flux. Tiny Furniture (its title the foremost of a long line of references to Dunham's mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, who reprises that role in the film's lightly fictionalized take on their family) is less an artisanal, autobiographical calling card than it is a singularly self-conscious debut, although it is assuredly both.
Dunham is post-calling card, after all, having written, directed, and starred in her first feature, Creative Nonfiction, while still an undergraduate at Oberlin. It was that film (and her webisode work on projects like Delusional Downtown Divas) that attracted the funding for Tiny Furniture. People liked what Dunham was up to, and that confidence, surely outmatched by her own, resulted in a further extension of her experiments in self-regard. More drawn to building themes than plot, Dunham's layering of Aura's indecisions and contradictions balances classic coming-of-age tropes with an of-this-moment, first-person perspective. The challenge for Aura to emerge as a person and not, say, a compendium of cultural references (of which there are many here), is compounded by her determination to find a clear artistic voice. And even then, the question persists: Just how much of your own life is allowed to inform your art before the authorities alert the narcissism police?
For young women especially, the established, knee-jerk threshold seems pretty low. And yet much of the startling pleasure of watching Dunham play Aura -- a recent Oberlin graduate crashing at home for a few weeks and seeking validation in all of its available forms -- is the extent to which the film seems to court such accusations just so it can flatten them with surprising turns into style and emotional resonance. That said, I imagine if I weren't so starved for convincing on-screen representations of young women in all their complex, refractive, and often very funny psychic disarray, I might have harder feelings about an obvious hustler like Dunham choosing to inhabit, under the guise of self-reflexivity, the persona of a hapless, comically under-dated schlub -- that is to say the prototype adopted by her alpha muse, Tina Fey.
Aura looks to her mother, Siri (Simmons), for guidance on the question of who and how to be. But when Aura shows up for her post-grad residency at her family's swishy Tribeca loft (the film was shot in the actual Dunham home), Siri barely acknowledges her, and her teenage sister Nadine (Grace Dunham) doles out a cheap shot at her figure and a little territorial pissing in lieu of a welcome.
These early scenes are marred by sitcom-grade quipping and stilted exchanges; the alienation of coming "home" and confronting a reconfigured family dynamic is established more intuitively. Characters are often held within wide open, white-matted frames, and the mise en scene -- like many of Simmons's photographs of miniature interiors and their inhabitants -- offers an unsettling balance of diorama and drift. DP Jody Lee Lipes has a knack for slowing down moments until they dissolve into metaphor: There's a clever shot of Aura face-flopping onto a couch, only to have her headspace literally invaded by her sister's slender legs as they mount a treadmill; later, an unseen air mattress deflates at length, Aura's perch on top of it lowering incrementally.
Siri, a chilly woman who has re-bordered her fiefdom in her daughter's absence, offers unsurprisingly cool comfort: "I never think about my twenties," she tells Aura. "And I never look back." A few scenes later we learn that Siri is in fact engrossed in a career retrospective -- a career the actual Simmons spent, it seems, teasing out her youthful ideas, which themselves grew out of her conflicted relationship with her suburban Long Island upbringing.
Aura's "Is this art yet?" bids for attention include a YouTube video of her amplitude spilling from a bikini as she brushes her teeth in a campus fountain; intentionally or not, her body is the joke, and from the hit count it seems that everybody laughed. Aura's melancholy as she shows the video to an estranged girlhood friend named Charlotte (the outrageous Jemima Kirke, who practically slaps the movie out of Dunham's hands and stalks off with it whenever she's onscreen) seems rooted not in shame or self-loathing but in the inkling that no matter what she does or how hard she tries, she won't escape her body, or the scrutiny it draws.
Readings from Siri's early diaries are a part of the film's survey of the booby traps, feminist and otherwise, studding the path toward a functional self. Part Susan Sontag ("I think of myself as this weird mutation from the '50s. Doris Day in Soho"), part Susan Powter ("I want to weigh between 125 and 128 pounds, and be happy"), these diary entries suggest that Siri's early inner life consisted mainly of careerist plotting and obsessing over food. "Our moms are assholes," Charlotte shrugs, "[They're] too successful not to be." Aura's kind of an asshole too -- a shitty friend, a selfish daughter and a slave to male attention -- but she's also funny, sensitive, and driven.
What's fascinating about the way she wields her body -- which is frequently, frankly pantsless -- is the way it seems to confront and mortify others. In one of the best scenes (a direct mirroring of the climax of Greenberg, a film generally reflected here in more glancing terms) Aura pulls rank over her teenaged sister, who is throwing a deafening rager while their mom is out, by parading through the party in her underpants. She gets the reaction she wants: rage and submission.
Which is not to say that Aura is immune to humiliation; indeed, she seems drawn to the most reliable sources she can find. There are two men in her life: Jed (Alex Karpovsky), a loathsome aspiring comic, and Keith (David Call), the handsome, deadbeat sous-chef at the restaurant where she works as a hostess. The moves she puts on both men -- Jed after she installs him in her home to freeload with perfect diffidence, Keith when he sniffs around for a Vicodin connection -- seem like an experiment with no hypothesis, an extension of the impulse to define herself against something or someone else.
After Aura punishes herself sufficiently with a gruesome episode of public sex, a certainty hardens within her. At home her mother is snitting about being left alone -- the funhouse lens on Dunham's home life has been torqued to eliminate her father, another artist, completely -- and Aura climbs into bed beside her to right the scales. "I want to be as successful as you are," she says suddenly, and in the doubled close-up it is movingly evident what this admission cost her.
Dunham is a deceptively responsive actress: more agile for her stillness; more naked for all the ways she tries to cover up. The complementary tone of droll but freighted psychodrama she strikes in Tiny Furniture feels like a significant but precarious achievement. I feel a pinch of worry for her -- as I did for Aura -- looking into a future of Rudins and Apatows. "It's hard to completely close the door on modes of western femininity," says Aura's college pal, already in mourning for the insular years of uninterrupted thought and unbounded expression, and resigned to the real world and its displacing, mercenary ways. "But my grant is up and my housing ends next week." This film is a foot in that door; with luck it will be looked back upon as the promise, and not the pinnacle, of an uncompromising career.