That is to say that it has a candy-pop allure that will have viewers flinging it back as if there’s no tomorrow, only to then be walloped by its mature substance.
Based on the novel of the same name by Robinne Lee, the film follows Anne Hathaway's art dealer Solène, newly aged 40, and her unlikely romance with 24-year-old boy bander, Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine). When Solène takes her daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), to Coachella, she inadvertently ends up in Hayes’ trailer (good luck to anyone with a VIP pass who believes they can it), striking up a connection with the gorgeous Brit. But when he shows up at her Los Angeles art gallery the next week and buys everything in it, he makes plain his intentions to take things beyond an audacious mid-show nod.
Soon, Solène is plunging headlong into his world, jet-setting to New York and around the world while Izzy is at summer camp. But their fragile relationship can only withstand the pressures of the outside world for so long.
Plenty have judged The Idea of You before even seeing it, designating it Harry Styles fan fiction with a derisive snicker. It’s true that Hayes and Harry have much in common, including their predilection for tattoos and heartthrob status. And unless you live under a rock, it’s impossible to miss the subtle references to One Direction (though credit to director Michael Showalter for delivering a fictional boy band who can perform better than the real McCoy). But both the text and the performances are far more nuanced and visceral than the implications of those who use such a label.
Yes, The Idea of You is a heck of a lot of fun, a bawdy May-December romance about a getting-her-groove-back suburban parent and a gentleman a few years removed from the cover of Tiger Beat. It luxuriates in itself, be it the genuinely infectious bops that Hayes' band August Moon performs or furtive caresses on private beaches. August Moon and Hayes Campbell are constructed with more care than some actual bands and music artists today, their music videos and Coachella set meticulously choreographed and executed.
But effusive frivolity does not deprive something of meaning, and fortunately, that's something Showalter (Search Party, Spoiler Alert), his co-writer Jennifer Westfeldt (Kissing Jessica Stein), and the cast understand.
Hathaway is ebullient, the sincere, effervescent energy that endeared her to audiences with her début in The Princess Diaries returning full tilt, with the scrapes and bruising of age and experience offering richer hues and deeper tints. It’s not difficult to see why any male, age 24 or 54, would be instantaneously captivated by her. Her broad movie star smile barely conceals the sincere, try-hard energy that both set her on an early path to success and led to years of undeserved internet derision and abuse.
In Hathaway’s hands, Solene is a gentler, crunchier version than the woman on the page, surrendering her Range Rover and Malibu apartment for a Subaru and craftsman-style home in Silver Lake. Her romance with Hayes is every bit as sweeping and forbidden as it is on the page, perhaps even more so given that Hayes’ world of private aircraft, Tag Heuer watches, and vacation residences in the South of France is so far from Solène’s own. This is also part of Showalter’s precise touch as a director — his spaces always feel lived-in and genuine, as if one could stroll into this character’s residence or art gallery tomorrow. Hathaway’s Solène is relatable, rather than aspirational.
She is genuinely living a fantasy with Hayes, one that is complicated by her age and awareness that she’ll be judged and scrutinized for daring to fell for a younger man. Hathaway flawlessly laces the needle, vacillating between the intoxicating allure of her affair with Hayes and the severe cost of such a relationship.
In some ways, Solène is an opportunity for Hathaway to address the misogyny she’s encountered in her career — to delve into a role that is about a woman relishing her sexuality and her pleasure at an age where she is expected to recede into the background. With Solène, Hathaway proclaims her proprietorship over her body, her career choices, and her refusal to let others take her pleasure.
Galitzine is the ideal costar, his cut-glass cheekbones and drowsy eyes the epitome of boy band attractiveness. Still, it is Galitzine’s more soulful side, the inquisitive intellect in his acting choices that makes his Hayes so beguiling. He’s both enigmatic and familiar, someone who feels capable of profoundly vulnerable conversations while remaining inscrutable. When Hayes does open up to Solène and show her aspects of himself the world will never know, he’s at his most irresistible. There’s some of Harry Styles’ impishness in his choices, but by and large, he makes Hayes entirely his own.
Nowadays, we rarely produce new movie icons, but Galitzine could shatter that paradigm. Between this, Red, White & Royal Blue, George & Mary, and Bottoms, Galitzine is on the verge of something huge — and at the very least, he’s demonstrated himself an inquisitive and nimble actor.
Not the least because his chemistry with his costars feels so effortless. He and Hathaway genuinely ignite together, from his hesitant, twisted grin when they first meet to the way she pulls on his lower lip in their first kiss. Galitzine understands how to touch someone for optimum effect, the gentle-but-firm encircling of Hathaway’s jaw and the fluid caress of her pelvis.
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The intimacy here is palpable and genuinely erotic, something severely absent in many of today’s screen romances. Showalter’s direction grants the film an eroticism without ever showing us more than a suggestion of exposed bottom. This is what critics mean when they desire for movies to be sexual again; the erotic is not in exposed skin but in the touch of fingertips, a meaningful gaze, or the arch of a pharynx in the pangs of rapture.
The film’s one blunder occurs in its central conflict. While the tabloids still expose Solène and Hayes, designating her a cougar and installing cameras outside her home, the whole situation feels rather toothless. Most of it plays out in frenetic montage and is dispensed with swiftly. But the ways in which the press invade Solène’s life should feel life-destroying. The off-hand comments of high school mean girls have more of an impact on Solène than the invasiveness that comes with courting a global phenomenon.
While its intended to emphasize that Solène makes choices to safeguard her daughter, it also muddies the impact of this affair on her interior life. Her decisions feel more rooted in matriarchal sacrifice than anything else, which minimizes her choice to protect not just her family, but also herself. The Idea of You recognizes that sometimes sorrow is the cost of something fleeting and exquisite, but the novel does a superior job of allowing Solène to arrive at that decision on her own terms.
Still, this is a minor criticism for a movie that is otherwise a delight of the highest order. It’s obvious those behind The Idea of You hold a genuine affection and concern for the story, rather than the sardonic eye that a book like this could so easily invite from an inferior team.
The Idea of You is a coming-of-middle-age tale and a sincere, cathartic love letter to unexpected connection and casting social pressure to the elements in pursuit of something genuine. We may have fallen in love with the concept of this movie, but blissfully, the actuality is even better.
