Jesse Eisenberg is the latest in a line of actors who decided to try his hand as a screenwriter and director. This American actor is probably still best remembered for his role as Mark Zuckerberg in Fincher’s “The Social Network”, and in the vast majority of other films he played some rather nerdy, geeky characters or whatever they are called today. That’s why it’s not surprising that the main character of his humorous drama is a teenager who bears an uncanny resemblance to the types Eissenberg often played, a young skinny nerd who hopes to become a new music star from social networks. Ziggy (Finn Wolhard or Mike from the series Stranger Things) is an equally strange and arrogant young man who seems to have no friends at all, and it seems as if the only meaning of his life is a social network where he live-streams some teenage songs.
He is completely uninterested in anything else, the only thing he is interested in is the number of subscribers, and the problem will arise when he becomes interested in the beautiful classmate Lila. In order to impress this politically aware girl who constantly laments world problems with her colleagues and writes engaging poetry, Ziggy will try to become interested in politics in order to start a conversation with her. His complete lack of interest in anything horribly irritates his mom, Evelyn (standard good Julianne Moore), a social worker who works at a shelter for women victims of violence and is always trying to help someone. However, this drive of hers is quite irritating, intrusive, and she constantly pushes herself into everything, and the domineering and hard-working mom, who is frustrated that she cannot shape her son with whom she has no common interests, will find a new fixation in the son of a shelter user.
And she will try to save the world with that small step, although it is clear to us from the beginning that the kid named Kyle is quite uninterested in her attention and agrees to her requests out of mere politeness. The idea of saving the world will become interesting to Ziggy because of Lila, but actually in a superficial way because we will soon realize that he is a spoiled narcissist, just like his mother. “When You Finish Saving the World” is one of those modern indie coming-of-age comedy dramas in which the main characters are a little Woody-alien, members of highly educated families of some middle class, left-liberal political orientation who mostly lament about world problems and follow trends, but rarely when they go beyond that mental masturbation.
Even though this film partly annoyed and irritated me, until the end “When You Finish Saving the World” was a warm, contemporary and current story about the generation gap, but also about the spirit of the times in which nominally everyone knows everything about most of the world’s problems, but due to their own conformity, hardly anyone decides to do something real. When something is done, it is often done, just like in the case of Ziggy and Evely, for some selfish reasons, in order to make themselves feel better, and it is nothing new that sometimes it is much easier to care about other people’s concerns and to suffer because of other people’s problems, but deal with their own difficulties. The film is also about the generational gap between parents and children who often do not understand each other completely and who are completely different worlds and simply do not know how to communicate at all anymore.