Listen Up Philip review – Jason Schwartzman is perfectly obnoxious

When it comes to intimidating emotional blankness, no one is more skilled than Jason Schwartzman. He is an actor who at 34 years old seems eerily no different from the precocious teenager who appeared in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore in 1998. Schwartzman deploys that same stonily implacable stare, like that of an exceptionally gifted child: supremely self-possessed, but somehow lacking in self-awareness, the kind of character who looks incapable of laughing or crying – but is perhaps more than capable of provoking those responses in others. Perhaps it’s the reason why he is largely a supporting player, an acquired taste; and his leading role in this film could in fact be a bit Marmitey for some.

For me, Schwartzman brings an unmatchable deadpan to a highly entertaining, unsentimental US indie about the New York literary scene, from writer-director Alex Ross Perry. It’s an engagingly low-key, freewheeling film in ways that don’t measure up to conventional screenplay-seminar verities, with hints of Cassavetes or Bob Rafelson.

Philip Lewis Friedmann (Schwartzman) is a hot young author about to bring out his second novel. It is clear that success has made Philip breathtakingly rude, selfish and obnoxious. Or maybe success just brought out qualities that were already there. To the dismay of his publisher, Philip airily cancels the promotional tour for the new book in favour of hanging out with his new best friend – Ike Zimmerman, an ageing and cantankerous literary lion wittily played by Jonathan Pryce: Ike is perhaps closer in status to Bernard Malamud than Philip Roth. There’s a very funny Spinal Tap-type montage of Ike’s book jacket designs from the 70s and 80s.

This is a meeting of minds of the not-caring. Ike doesn’t care because he’s old and rich enough not to give a damn; Philip doesn’t care because he is predisposed not to. Ike has decided to mentor young Philip, inviting him to stay in his upstate country retreat and advising getting out of New York. “It has a creative energy, but not a productive energy,” he announces, gnomically. Ike gets Philip a cushy creative-writing professor gig, and unconsciously demonstrates to him and us how Philip will one day end up: arrogant, opinionated and lonely. It goes without saying that both men are estranged from the women in their lives. Just as Ike is alienated from his angry daughter Melanie (Krysten Ritter), who resents Philip’s appearance in their family home, so the younger man is entirely uninterested in his photographer girlfriend Ashley: an excellent performance from Elisabeth Moss. He then contrives to be predatory and cloying, and yet detached, in his attentions to fellow academic Yvette (Joséphine De La Baume).

Philip’s sublimely impregnable self-absorption is what gives the title its meaning. There are two unwatchably horrible scenes at the beginning. Keyed up by the imminent new novel, Philip insists on having meetings with a former girlfriend and with his former college roommate. This is solely so that he can rub their noses in his (assumed) success, an attitude even more intolerable with his college contemporary, as he pretends to be appalled at his friend’s lack of comparable ambition and success. (If his friend was successful, that of course really would appal him.) Perry shows that for some men, success is conceived as a kind of gloating revenge on all the people they knew way back when – and on the world. In fact, it wouldn’t have the same savour without this shrill, defiant revenge.

Elisabeth Moss is quietly excellent in this film, despite having a role that condemns her to be upstaged by Schwartzman nearly all of the time. She is the human half of a dysfunctional couple and has very human responses to the implosion of their relationship. After the breakup, she complains that he still owes her a lot of money, the kind of real, shrewd detail that rarely gets a look-in with relationship comedies. And, when Philip walks out, Perry gives us a bravura closeup on her face, almost choking and sobbing with defiance and self-validation. Moss deserves an award for that moment alone. Listen Up Philip is a reminder of the kind of independent movies conceived without rigid adherence to narrative formula and romcom recipe. It’s more like a inspired sax solo: meandering but also exhilarating.