Critics are in ecstasy over this film, and New Yorkers are standing in long lines at IFC to see it (and IFC has it playing every hour, all day long.) It is so terrible my wife and I agreed we should have walked out after 10 minutes, and I must say that describing this film’s awfulness is neither easy nor rewarding for me – I would prefer to forget it altogether, as soon as possible.

Francis Ha is co-written by Greta Gerwig, and it feels like a rip off of her last two major roles, Lola Versus and Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress. From Lola Versus comes the base story – an immature and naive woman in her mid-to-late 20’s suffers relationship instability and suddenly finds herself adrift in her life, by virtue of which she learns various life lessons and eventually settles in a place of relative contentment. From Damsels in Distress comes an attempt to mimic Whit Stillman’s humor and quirky approach to dialog and scene structure, along with the daffy-but-purposeful affect of Francis herself, which echoes Gerwig’s character Violet in Damsels.

But Lola Versus was a funny, charming little movie, and Gerwig’s character Lola was a lovely and appealing creation – convincingly flawed, but smart, human and sweetly likable – who traverses a quite pleasing developmental arc over the course of the movie. It might not have been a great movie, but it was well-written and nicely directed, made great use of music, and had solid character development, even among the supporting players. Francis Ha, on the other hand, is sluggishly unfunny, suffers from sloppy and indifferent character development across the board, makes terrible, clumsy use of music, and has a story that somehow manages to be simultaneously incoherent and contrived, the only point of which, apparently, is to create a series of dull and unconvincing vignettes for the completely unlikable and irritating twit Francis to parade around in.

The one addition to the base story from Lola Versus, which might have partially saved the film had it been done competently, is the central relationship of Francis and her best friend Sophie. But this innovation just deepens the disaster, because the writing is so terrible Francis and Sophie do not even remotely seem like best friends. Everything is wrong: their conversations, their body language, their actions toward each other, and their joint evolution. Their relationship is so false, and Sophie so badly conceived as a character, that the movie can’t even successfully hold dramatic tension between the two. Every time Sophie reappears, you’re like “ugh, why is she back?” Every time something happens between them, you’re like “ugh, whatever!”

As for the mimicry of Whit Stillman, it too is a disaster. In his early masterpieces, Stillman’s dialog managed to be crisp, quirky, funny, absurd, realistic, beautiful-sounding, profound and above all unique, all at the same time; in his deeply flawed later films, it still remained at least somewhat quirky and fresh. The dialog in Frances Ha, on the other hand, is none of the above, built almost entirely on tired cliches and over-recycled ideas, jumbled, stumbling and ugly-sounding, and further marred by muddled scene composition and the previously mentioned sloppy character development.

If unknown writers tried to sell this shit to a paying audience they’d fall flat on their faces, but shoot it in black and white and stamp Noah Baumbach on the cover, and you’re guaranteed widespread critical acclaim. It’s kind of infuriating, the attention this stupidly pretentious film is getting, while an amazingly fresh, funny and insightful indie film like Mental – featuring an actress (Toni Collette) who has more talent in her little finger than Greta Gerwig has in her whole body – is arrogantly dismissed by these same critics. Or to give another example, a sweet and earnest little film like last year’s Hello I Must Be Going, which has a story that coincides 80% with Francis Ha, yet completely transcends it on so many levels, is almost entirely ignored by critics, and was gone from theaters before you could blink.

This film was so traumatic, I think I may have developed an allergy to Greta Gerwig, an actress I formerly found really charming. It also completely confirmed my impression of Noah Baumbach as a dangerously overrated filmmaker, critical praise of whom should be consumed with great caution and trepidation.

This piece of crap will probably win the Oscar for best original screenplay, but count Irreviews as a dissenting voice concerning the artistic brilliance of this film.