“Who’s out there?” Adam Driver’s Jack Gladney whispers to the ceiling (from whence we are staring down) with all the self-seriousness of a character in the thesis play of a drama student enamoured with but not entirely comprehending Brecht. “Who are you?” he adds, a beat later. With this and other vaguely postmodern discursions of perspective, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s seems to be not just telegraphing the loneliness of a man in the early stages of the dissolution of his marriage and sanity, but also aspiring toward a commentary on—what? Identity? Voyeurism? The nesting meta of adaptation as a form of immortality? Probably all of the above, which attests to Baumbach’s general oversaturation of his judicious source. DeLillo’s novel is acerbic, dry, and dark, haunted by the
