It’s easy to understand why people might love Lena Dunham’s feature film debut Tiny Furniture – and also easy to see why some people might hate it to the extent that they would allow their antipathy towards the film to spill over to the then-23 year old director. Because while this is an effortlessly well crafted, quirky little film, it’s also one that is so confident in its own hipness that it can often be astonishingly irritating. In the end, I would say it wins out as an impressive satire – but it’s a close-run thing.

What is now called mumblecore and decades ago would be a slacker movie, Tiny Furniture is an essentially plotless look at the life of Aura (played by the director) who returns home from university with a cool but useless film theory degree and finds herself back living with her mother and sister, trying to adjust to her new (or old) life, rekindle friendships, end university relationships and hook up with a couple of entirely unsuitable (and mostly disinterested) guys. Within this framework, the film meanders through a series of moments, not really going anywhere – intentionally – while the central character becomes less and less sympathetic (the jury is out on just how intentional that is).

Slick, well-shot, witty and quietly satirical, the film manages to be a subtly pointed stab at hipster culture – a world of interesting awful, superficial people with facial hair, eccentric hats and loft parties, where Youtube celebrities are actually a thing (Aura is impressed with a waster who makes astonishingly dreadful and pretentious Youtube clips, while she herself has an embarrassingly poor video ‘art’ piece – ironically a genuine short film from Dunham, suggesting she has an awareness of her own failings – that has attracted nothing but scathing and personal comments online). The film pricks at the bubble of students who leave university with pointless degrees and then think the world owes them a living – and possibly a cool media job while at the same time exposing the vulnerability of someone who has lived a pampered life and is now being forced to deal with the real world. Aura is remarkably hard to like as the film progresses – shitting on old friends, throwing tantrums at her mother (who has rather reasonably complained about how many bottles of wine were consumed during a trip away) and behaving more like a child than an adult – and her life choices are continually idiotic.

All this is good – and despite some iffy performances, the film does an excellent job of exposing the various flaws of its characters, none of whom are remotely sympathetic. But the sense of self-absorption shown by the characters seems to spill over into the film. Dunham doesn’t quite manage to match her hero Woody Allen’s knack of making his malfunctioning alter-ego’s likeable if unsympathetic (to be fair, Allen hasn’t been able to do that for decades either), and while critics have praised her bravery in allowing herself to be see as a pretty unattractive character – both physically and emotionally – you can’t help but feel that there’s a lot of ego going on in this self-deprecation… an awareness of just how much praise this ‘bravery’ will bring. Make no mistake, there is a lot of vanity involved in this film – Dunham’s screen mother and sister are played by her real life mother and sister, and the ridiculously expensive home the film is mostly shot in is her real home - a blurring of fiction and reality that goes someway to explaining why some people have had issues separating the character from her creator. And the film has a self-awareness that borders on smugness – it’s ironically as self-consciously hip as any of the characters it’s satirising. It’s no surprise that so many critics adore it – many of them will be the very people it is reflecting.

I can forgive all that in the end though, because the little moments of the film that make you laugh (people who say this is hilarious need to see more comedy, but it does have some sharply observed chucklesome moments), the effortless real characters, the visual style and a few genuinely poignant scenes that hint that Aura might actually emerge from her self-absorption at some point. By any standards, it’s a very good film, if not the masterpiece some are suggesting. But whether you will want to spend 100 minutes in Aura’s world is open to question.

The DVD also contains a pretty impressive interview with Dunham discussing the nature of indie film today – she seems smart, clued-in and personable – as well as a selection of her shorts (including the one referenced in Tiny Furniture), which you can probably live without ever watching.

DAVID FLINT

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