Baumbach slips in While We're Young

I have generally liked Noah Baumbach's movies, especially his previous one, Frances Ha, which seemed to me to beautifully capture a moment in time and place, the mood of a generation of young people struggling to get by in a biog city and to find themselves, their personalities, their friends, and their mates. I wish I could say the same about While We're Young, his attempt in the same way and in the same urbanscape - NYC with its crowded gritty streets and crappy looking building within which people live lives of eccentric creativity and lavish self-indulgence - an a slightly older generation, early 40s, w/ the central couple, the somewhat more talented as a dramatic actor than you'd expect Ben Stiller and the always watchable Naomi Watts as an early-40s childless couple, struggling w/ that issue esp as others in their cohort enter late parenthood, and latching on to a much younger couple in some misguided attempt to rejuvenate. Unfortunately, despite a few a amusing scenes with Baumbach's usually sharp, acerbic dialogue, all of the characters in the film are unlikable narcissists and I could never for a moment buy into why Stiller and Watts, Stiller especially, fell into the clutches of the younger couple who were obviously scamming them. Although it's unsaid, it appears that all of the characters are trust-fund babies, as none seems to be working other than nominally yet they lead lives of great material comfort - the realism that guided Baumback in Frances Ha and others (Squid and Whale, e.g.) slips away from him here as he seems to imagine that struggling documentary filmmakers in NYC can live in 50k square foot apartments? This may be another case of filmmakers moving ever farther from their audiences as they have no idea how to represent lives of squalor and poverty - the Woody Allen syndrome. In fact, Allen is a guiding light here, as the Stiller character, especially in a few hilarious scenes in which he tries to explain or pitch his obviously dreadful documentary in progress, seem to make him an early Allen avatar incarnate. Also some very funny scenes of Watts learning to dance hip-hop - she actually becomes really good at ti. The good will that those scenes create, however, get pissed away, sadly, in some awful scenes such as Stiller bloviating at an awards ceremony about how documentaries should be real and not fake or staged, blah blah blah, or the totally grotesque scene in which Watts and Stiller get high on peyote with a group and then everyone vomits into various basins and elsewhere. Film has a seemingly happy ending, but by then I was way checked out.