Maude Apatow's debut is pleasant fun

PLOT: An empty nester (Leslie Mann) who has relocated to a small college town with her family audits a poetry class and becomes entangled in the lives of two best friends (Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman) who are taking the class.

REVIEW: Poetic License marks the directorial debut of Maude Apatow, a familiar face from her roles in her father Judd Apatow’s films, as well as HBO’s Euphoria. One thing that has marked many of Judd’s later films is his shift from hardcore comedy to gentler comedy-drama in the mold of James L. Brooks, and his daughter Maude seems to share very much the same vision in that respect. Indeed, in the introduction to Poetic License at SXSW, the moderator mentioned that the film feels like it was plucked out of another era of moviemaking, which it does — and I mean that as a compliment.

The fact is, high-end comedy-dramas like this often don’t get made anymore, so it’s worth celebrating when a new one comes out, especially when it’s this good. The recent failure of Ella McCay shows just how hard it can be for movies like this to connect critically, but what Apatow has done here is make an old-fashioned movie that’s up-to-date enough that it doesn’t feel like a relic.

She gives her mother, Leslie Mann, a great part as Liz, a former therapist who, after a career-ending error, opted to become a stay-at-home mom. But with her beloved daughter, Dora (Nico Parker), in her last year of high school and wanting some independence, Liz has a whole lot of free time, especially now that she’s moved to a college town where her husband, James (Method Man), is an economics professor.

Mann is excellent, with Liz overbearing but also cool and charismatic enough that she never loses your sympathy. Most importantly, you believe why this kind, understanding, and — let’s face it — hot woman totally upends the relationship between the film’s other two leads, Cooper Hoffman’s Ari and Andrew Barth Feldman’s Sam.

The two men are co-dependent best friends, the type who do everything together and tend to interfere in each other’s lives. Feldman’s Sam is an economics student on the verge of graduating who’s unsure about his future in finance, an industry he’s starting to think he’s unsuited for. Hoffman’s Ari is a trust-fund kid with no direction and is also somewhat depressed, when he’s not wildly manic. As someone who was a lot like Ari in college — minus the trust fund — I found him easy to relate to, with Hoffman once again showing what a charismatic performer he’s growing into. Feldman, who impressed in No Hard Feelings (and has a kind of Martin Short-style vibe) is likable as the nice, low-key Sam, and you understand how both men would fall hard for Liz, to the point that they start competing for her. Liz has no romantic interest in either of them, but she’s so self-involved that she fails to notice how the boys are starting to fall for her.

In Apatow’s movie, which has a sharp script by Raffi Donatich, everyone comes off as well-intentioned and nice. While Liz is self-absorbed, she doesn’t want to hurt the boys, while neither of the guys becomes a creep in his pursuit of her. It’s all played for laughs, which is refreshing, as most modern movies would label at least one of the characters “problematic.” Here, they’re all just three-dimensional people, albeit ones without any real malice in them.

Apatow has also surrounded the three stars with an interesting ensemble. Nico Parker continues to be one of the best young actors out there as Liz’s daughter, who loves her mom but needs a bit of space to do her own thing. Method Man is terrific as Liz’s husband, perhaps the most versatile rapper-turned-actor in recent memory. He’s been great in a lot of things, and you buy him completely as a university academic and family man. One of the best parts goes to Martha Kelly as the hilariously blunt, deadpan poetry teacher. Plus, Maisy Stella from My Bad Ass is fun as Sam’s mean-spirited, obnoxious girlfriend, who is the bane of Ari’s existence. Like her father, Maude Apatow has a knack for letting her supporting players shine.

Upstart distributor Row K is set to put out Poetic License in theaters this summer, and hopefully folks give it a chance, as it feels like a breath of fresh air. Most rom-com-style movies are either too silly to be taken seriously or too cautious in their approach. Poetic License feels like one of those movies where everyone involved just focused on making an entertaining film rather than one that checked all the necessary boxes.