Jesse Eisenberg’s Prickly Characters Strain Against When You Finish Saving the World

This review originally ran as part of Paste’s Sundance 2022 coverage.

Jesse Eisenberg, whose ability to weaponize awkward mania and/or self-conscious cruelty made him a movie star and earned him an Oscar nomination, adapts his own sprawling Audible Original in his directorial debut, the specific yet wanting When You Finish Saving the World. Eisenberg’s actorly specialties permeate the film, as do his associations with Bloomington and its Middle Way House, but his personal touch too briefly colors a script that’s suffered in the reduction from decades-spanning story of a complicated family into a simple snapshot of one’s present-day struggles. Prickly characters and a knack for mortifying situations strain to break free from When You Finish Saving the World’s limited and dispassionate plotting.

The relatively straightforward story of generational disconnect surveys the cultural cavern between pretentious social worker Evelyn (Julianne Moore) and her TikTok singer-songwriter son Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard, reprising the role from the audio original). The self-involved pair don’t understand each other because, well, teenagers, but also because Evelyn is a preachy-cruel liberal and Ziggy is a doofus whose lyrics come from RhymeZone and whose voice sounds like Rivers Cuomo’s Bob Dylan impression. They’re bad to each other, and they’re looking for something different to make them whole. Ziggy gets lightly radicalized due to a crush on his politically active classmate Lila (Alisha Boe), while Evelyn fetishizes Kyle (Billy Bryk), the supportive blue-collar son of Angie (Eleonore Hendricks), a survivor staying at her shelter.

Lila and Kyle bear the burden of these two self-involved people looking to assuage their own need to be important—Boe and Bryk mostly stand around looking like they’d rather be anywhere else—and it’s kind of a pain to watch even though Wolfhard and Moore really sell their off-putting characters. Wolfhard’s got that “like and subscribe” cadence down pat and succeeds in making Ziggy just pure enough to be an oblivious but not detestable goober. Moore, especially when balanced by brilliant scene-steals from Jay O. Sanders (who plays Ziggy’s dad), adds depth to familiar contradictions: Biting yet well-meaning, charitable yet condescending. But as the pair work through Eisenberg’s washed-out Midwest, they’re met with less constructive contradictions.