‘When You Finish Saving The World’ Review: Jesse Eisenberg’s Wry, Empathetic Directorial Debut Is Delightful [Sundance]

“Mom, do you think I can be political?” asks teenage YouTube musician Ziggy Katz (a wide-eyed Finn Wolfhard) to his uptight mom Evelyn (the consistently stellar Julianne Moore). There’s no shortcut to sounding smart, she replies, you have to do the work. Thus begins the uneasy relationship between mother and son in Jesse Eisenberg’s delightfully wry feature-length directorial debut “When You Finish Saving The World.” Adapted from his own audio project, Eisenberg offers sharp — if not original — critiques of the pratfalls of seeking internet fame, well-meaning liberalism, and fraught parent-child relationships among a generational divide. 

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When not working in the women’s shelter she founded, Eveyln is the kind of sophisticated, educated, bleeding-heart liberal who listens to classical music in her environmentally friendly tiny car and has a glass of red wine in hand. She doesn’t understand her son Ziggy, who used to sing protest songs with her at marches when he was a child, but now spends all his free time earning money singing the twee songs he writes for his 20,000 followers on the social media platform High Hat. Missing the closeness they once had, she finds herself drawn to Kyle (Billy Bryk), the unusually sensitive son of a woman living at her shelter. 

Eisenberg astutely observes the way parents can find an outlet in other people’s children because all they see are the good things, with none of the baggage that comes from actually rearing them. There is a sly critique of both the power structure at play for residents of shelters, as well as the subtle classism that can be rooted in otherwise well-intended suggestions of upward mobility. Evelyn channels her ambitions for Ziggy by pressuring Kyle into thinking about going to college and becoming a social worker after high school rather than working in his dad’s garage, despite his insistence that he finds fixing someone’s car personally fulfilling. “But what if you can have that feeling. . . but even greater?” she argues. 

This is mirrored in an earlier scene where Ziggy tells his mom he’ll write a song so political it will have a far bigger impact on the world than she could ever have running her shelter in someplace as small as Wilmington, Indiana. Both mother and son are narcissists, though neither can see that fault in themselves. Eisenberg understands that the most fraught relationships between parents and children often come from having personalities that are just far too similar for comfort.   

Meanwhile, Ziggy’s own political awakening comes not from his mother’s influence but rather from his crush on schoolmate and youth activist Lila (a breakout turn from Alisha Boe). Lila spends her days at a club called Revolutionary Arts, where kids sing socialist anthems, and Lila debuts a slam poem about the colonial ravaging of the Marshall Islands. Beguiled by Lila’s passion for politics, he wants to be like her but can’t help thinking about his 20,000 followers. He’s grown up in the age of personal branding, signing off his videos as “the real Ziggy Katz,” as if he were a celebrity. In fact, “ZK” is everywhere, from the neon sign in his room to his plethora of personalized beanies and shirts. A melancholic undertone of the film implies that, like modern American politics itself, Ziggy may be too far gone to ever entirely to remove himself from the pull of capitalism.

Featuring rich cinematography from Benjamin Loeb (“After Yang”), there are touches of Jim Jarmusch, too, including several great street-level tracking shots of Ziggy as he makes his way around town on foot. There’s also the whimsy of Miranda July in Ziggy’s YouTube performances and Elveyn’s many meltdowns in her tiny car. The very intellectual yet dysfunctional milieu in which the story is set is cut from the same cloth as Eisenberg’s breakout film “The Squid and the Whale” by Noah Baumbach.

But although these inspirations are apparent, Eisenberg’s crafts a style distinctly his own. The dialogue matches his trademark staccato cadence. The tonality of synthy score from Emile Mosseri (“The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” “Minari”) brings the film deeply into Ziggy’s lo-fi world, as do his cheesy songs, which Ziggy describes as “classic folk-rock with alternative inspirations.” 

An accomplished first film, “When You Finish Saving The World,” is erudite yet breezy, heartfelt, but not cloying. Its many playful edits, careful world-building, stellar performances, and insightful screenplay suggest Eisenberg is a filmmaker with a deep understanding of form and an empathetic grasp of the flaws that make us human. [B]

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