“The Idea Of You” Is A Love Letter To Girlhood Joy

So, here’s the breakdown–this movie is more than One Direction fan fiction.

This week, an unusual yet all-too-familiar variety of rom-com dropped. “The Idea Of You” starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, and follows Hathaway as art gallery owner Soléne Marchand and Galitzine as Hayes Campbell, the frontman of fictional boy band August Moon. It’s an age gap romance, it's a fanfiction, it’s a comedy, and perhaps most importantly, a love letter to girlhood joy through the ages.

The movie begins at Soléne’s quaint bungalow in the Silverlake neighborhood in east Los Angeles, as she prepares to drop off her teenage daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin) and her friends at her ex husband Daniel’s house. Daniel (Reid Scott) is to bring them all to Coachella, complete with VIP passes to meet their long lost “so-seventh grade” favorite band August Moon. In lieu of attending Coachella, Soléne plans to go camping to “process the past 20 years” while it's her ex-husband’s weekend with Izzy.

Already, the movie opens by asking far more poignant questions than several of its alleged fanfiction-adapted predecessors (think the “After” franchise). As Soléne tells her friend Tracy (Annie Mumolo) that her art and her daughter “may be all that she wants”, Tracy quips, “Is it?”

Immediately after this conversation, Izzy enters the kitchen, grateful but a bit disgruntled by the August Moon meet-and-greet tickets in a way that only a high schooler gone edgy could be about a band. “Nowadays it's all about insanely talented female singer-songwriters,” Izzy explains to Soléne and Tracy as her reasoning for falling out of love with August Moon and boy band culture.

@belleperez_It’s honestly a bop and nostalgic af 🤩 #theideaofyou #augustmoon #nicholasgalitzine #onedirection

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These opening conversations set the tone of the film at a multi-generational level. The pressure to grow up and be taken seriously, and the pressure that single women over 40 feel when it comes to finding authentic love. On the music front, it's about listening to feel-good pop and growing into the melancholic stylings of Lana Del Rey and the confessional writings of Taylor Swift to steady oneself through the heartbreaks of living, and regarding anything else as childish. This movie winds up delivering engaging narratives on all of these topics.