The Idea of You: Anne Hathaway’s skin-fizzing romcom gets all the dumb stuff just right
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Here is what must be the millennial memento mori of the year: learning that Anne Hathaway has a new age-gap-based romantic comedy coming out and realising she’s playing the old one. Following the release of her suburban psychodrama Mothers’ Instinct in March, the 41-year-old Devil Wears Prada star’s busy year continues with this highly watchable and wholly unoriginal May September love story, about a single mother who finds herself enthusiastically wooed by a member of her daughter’s favourite boyband.
She’s Solène, a gallery owner from the hip Los Angeles suburb of Silver Lake – while he, played by Mary & George’s Nicholas Galitzine, is Hayes Campbell, a doe-eyed Harry Styles type. The two meet at an autograph-signing session for his band August Moon, a transatlantic quintet of close-harmony heartthrobs. Soon Solène is being whisked off on their European tour – much to the chagrin of her ex-husband (Reid Scott), whose own new younger partner looks borderline pensionable alongside Hayes’ youthful charms.
The plot, adapted from a 2017 novel by Robinne Lee, has no surprises to throw at you: the two initially bond over their shared trust issues (her stung by love; him by fame), then inevitably fall out over her age-based insecurities and his womanising past. And its take on the pressures of fame – paparazzi in the bushes, mean tabloid headlines, the odd toxic YouTube comment – feels quaintly Noughties-coded in the age of smartphones and TikTok.
Even so, two things make it worth watching. The first is August Moon’s hilariously plausible songbook, which was written by Savan Kotecha and Carl Falk, two seasoned pop composers who count Maroon 5 and One Direction among their clients. (“I know that you’re a little bit ol…der / But baby rest your head on my shoul…der / Before it gets a little bit col…der,” Galitzine croons over a silky smooth sixth chord: perfection.)
The second is something you initially notice when that number’s performed at an early gig, which is that both close up and at a remove, Hathaway is extraordinarily good at playing attraction. It’s not quite as simple as the two leads having strong chemistry: rather, it’s the finely observed push-and-pull between desire and hesitation on Solène’s part that give the film its surprising level of heat. The two’s first kiss is a skin-fizzing paragon of the form, while the whirlwind-romance montage that follows – accompanied, naturally, by yet another August Moon banger – is actually sexy, which may be a first. Would the film have ideally been a bit smarter? Perhaps. But it gets all of the dumb stuff just right.
15 cert, 116 mins. Selected cinemas and Amazon Prime Video from Thursday 2nd May
