“You’re not even a person till you’re 30,” says a friend to Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway), a single woman celebrating her 40th birthday. “Then you spend the next 10 years figuring out what kind of person you want to be.” In The Idea of You, adapted from the Robinne Lee romance novel that was ostensibly based on fan fiction about erstwhile One Direction heartthrob Harry Styles, age is only a problem insomuch as other people make it one, rooting its romantic complications in the somehow still revolutionary idea that people (and women specifically) grow and bloom throughout every phase of life.
Solène is a Los Angeles art gallery owner still nursing wounds from her not-so-recent divorce while doing her best to amicably co-parent her teenage daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), with her ex-husband, Daniel (Reid Scott), whose cheating ways led to their separation. When Daniel has a sudden work emergency, Solène has to put a solo camping weekend on pause to take Izzy and her friends to Coachella, where she manages to cross paths with Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the lead singer of August Moon, the world’s most popular boy band.
Hayes is instantly smitten by Solène and ends up serenading her from the stage. From there, he’s showing up at her gallery and leaving his expensive watch in her home as an excuse to see her again. Solène is initially resistant to the courtship, but when Izzy leaves for summer camp, she accompanies Hayes on the European leg of August Moon’s world tour. But fame has a way of complicating things, and with the added pressure of being an older woman dating a younger man, Hayes and Solène’s relationship may be over before it’s even had a chance to truly begin.
Michael Showalter’s film feels like both a return to form and step forward for Hathaway, who hasn’t lent her mega-watt charisma this successfully to a romcom in at least a decade. Solène allows her the rare chance to remind audiences what a star she is while also giving her a role befitting her new “woman of a certain age” status that doesn’t discount her character’s needs, desires, or personhood. Galitzine is given slightly less interiority to play with but nonetheless matches his co-star’s charm and emotional weight beat for beat. The two make heart-swelling music together, and, with apologies to Anyone But You’s Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, make The Idea of You the best argument that there’s life yet left in the romcom genre.
Showalter continues to quietly revolutionize the romcom with the pointed depth of feeling and workaday pragmatism he brought to films like They Came Together and The Big Sick (not to mention the thematically similar, if inferior, Hello, My Name Is Doris). For one, the script, by Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt, grounds the material with insight about the expectations facing women as they age, intergenerational romance, and self-discovery as a lifelong process.
But there’s a slight tension between The Idea of You’s emotional honesty and its unlikely setup, almost as if Showalter and Westfeldt are so self-conscious about viewers taking the film seriously that they hyper-focus on the central relationship while underplaying the whole reverse Notting Hill angle. Make no mistake, Hayes’s superstar status creates complications for him and Solène, but it’s a bit strange when the conflict touted in the film’s logline about the difficulties of fame takes a back seat to the more realistic issues that come with an age-gap relationship.
Though The Idea of You is mostly interested in showbiz as a backdrop, it does deliver the goods when it comes to original music. Penned by Savan Kotecha (who is himself responsible for a bevy of One Direction’s early hits and served as executive music producer for David Dobkin’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga), the handful of August Moon tracks aren’t trying to ape a certain boy band sound so much as serve as solid pop ditties in their own right. With titles like “I Got You,” “Guard Down,” and “Dance Before We Walk,” the tracks help tell the story of Hayes and Solène’s romance but also build the world and fill in the background of August Moon as an aging band and the lead singer’s transition into a solo artist.
The Idea of You is sure to chafe those who find something untoward in the notion of a woman approaching middle age romancing someone who’s 16 years her junior, and that’s the point. But the filmmakers aren’t just interested in what’s taboo. They actually unpack how society expects women of a certain age to behave and villainizes them when they cross that line. You may wish that there were a bit for more crotch-grabbing boy-band fun to be had here, but the The Idea of You is a sensitive, dewy-eyed romance about two adults in the process of becoming.
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Rocco…Great review. Your writing is superb.