When You Finish Saving the World review – Jesse Eisenberg’s promising but flawed directorial debut

With his directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg has crafted the sort of cringe-inducing family drama that would have been written as a starring vehicle for him had it been made 15 years earlier. Adapted from Eisenberg's own 2020 audio drama of the same name, it sees Finn Wolfhard in the ultimate Eisenberg role that never was: an obnoxious, fast-talking teen musician who is like Eisenberg’s character from Noah Baumbach's Squid and the Whale transplanted to the modern day.

In that film, the actor’s budding singer-songwriter strived for popularity by ripping off Pink Floyd songs and passing them as his own. Here, Wolfhard’s character Ziggy Katz already has a degree of online popularity, even if having 20,000 followers means very little to his real life peers. They’re more deeply invested in important social issues than any of the bland subjects he writes bad songs about.

It’s the Stranger Things actor’s most promising big screen role to date, even if it does take some time to acclimatise to a deliberately off-putting character who delivers his rants of self-importance and alienation with the same breathless delivery you’d associate with the man behind the camera. His jaded demeanour contrasts with that of Julianne Moore as his mother Evelyn, a woman who helps run a shelter for domestic abuse survivors and is as every bit as selfless as he is selfish. Over the course of several years, mother and son have grown apart; she has paid no attention to his online success, and he makes excuses to avoid spending time with her.

Moore has the more easily empathetic role, but the strongest moments in her performance are the few that make a point of pairing her with her onscreen son, where the motherly facade suddenly slips off. In a character study of a woman who professionally makes herself a matriarchal figure to those in need, her domestic sequences with Wolfhard tease something far closer to an upper middle class We Need to Talk About Kevin, where the simmering disdain between generations is something that seems unable to be resolved.

Eisenberg’s screenplay does a great job of illustrating how the pair grew apart without succumbing to flashbacks or cheap exposition, but is far better at illustrating this divide from the parental angle. Presumably to avoid dating the film to a specific moment in time, Ziggy’s dialogue is peppered with invented slang terms (“lift” to mean “sweet,” for example) that highlight a teen too caught in his online bubble to properly communicate or engage – but this mannered screenwriting choice does become more of a distraction than intended. The generational divide between Eisenberg and the teen character he’s created means the drama feels slightly out of touch, failing to articulate a believably internet-brained Gen Z lexicon, even if Wolfhard’s performance easily elevates the writing.

The audio drama of When You Finish Saving the Word spanned decades, but structuring the film adaptation around one specific period in an enduringly fractured mother/son relationship proves a smart choice. The screenplay isn’t without its awkward missteps, but it is nonetheless a promising if flawed debut for Eisenberg.

When You Finish Saving the Word was screened as part of Sundance Film Festival 2022. A UK release date is yet to be set.