White Noise: 5 Stars

Noah Baumbach adapts challenging source material with apparent ease in an 80s-set black comedy. Emma Simmonds hails White Noise as absurd, gloriously silly and extremely funny

'Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we keep inventing hope,’ remarks a gobsmacked professor in the latest from Noah Baumbach, the writer-director behind Marriage Story and The Squid And The Whale. The human condition comes under scrutiny and existential angst abounds, but there’s also a lot of fun to be had in this satirical and spectacularly silly film.

Taking the form of an apocalyptic black comedy, White Noise is a pretty close adaptation of Don DeLillo’s eighth novel (his 1985 breakout after years on the literary fringes) that manages to make room for Baumbach’s own humour and domestic concerns. If you’ve ever struggled to shield your kids from bad news, this is the film for you. Adam Driver stars as Jack Gladney, a lecturer in Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, who teams tinted blue aviators and bold prints with a sweeping black cape: he is essentially a campus rock star. In a scene which wonderfully sends up pretentious academics, we see Jack using his clout and dramatic flair to help pal Murray (Don Cheadle) establish himself as an Elvis expert during a dazzling joint lecture (‘Elvis is my Hitler,’ Murray tells Jack to win him round).

Jack is mostly sorted in his homelife too; he’s loved up with his current wife Babette (Baumbach’s partner Greta Gerwig) who is a fitness instructor to seniors, and their large, blended family of affectionate and slightly know-it-all squabblers. The couple’s fragile sense of security goes out the window when they find themselves displaced by an ‘airborne toxic event’, which their son Heinrich (Sam Nivola) seems to know more about than anyone. Meanwhile, Babette’s eldest daughter Denise (Raffey Cassidy) is more concerned about the mysterious pills her mother has been popping and her consequent forgetfulness.

Driver sports a look of mildly alarmed bemusement throughout, which fits the material like a glove, with an endearingly scatty Gerwig making a welcome return to acting with her first lead role since 2016. Both actors are operating at enough of a remove to make the absurdism pop, as if their characters can’t quite believe it all either. Set in the proximity of the novel’s mid-80s publication, White Noise riffs on America's Cold War paranoia and increasing prescription-drug dependency. Yet, coming post-pandemic and in a time of perma-crisis, it also resonates strongly with our renewed sense of societal panic. Baumbach has said that he was inspired to create it because he ‘wanted to make a movie as crazy as the world appears to me right now’.

White Noise is an extremely funny film that’s constantly reinventing itself in playful ways: from its montage of movie car crashes to flirtations with the sci-fi, horror and conspiracy genres. It even throws in a musical sequence, while the farcical nature of the family’s predicament has something of a National Lampoon’s Vacation-style adventure about it. Baumbach had his work cut out adapting the challenging source material and bringing such disparate influences together but, in the end, he makes it look easy.

White Noise is in cinemas from Friday 2 December and on Netflix from Friday 30 December.