A doppelganger role can be a trap for an actor: either the two roles are not sufficiently distinct, or they are too hammily different, and either way the result can look like a film school graduation project. But Jesse Eisenberg gives a stylish split-personality turn in Richard Ayoade’s adaptation of the Dostoevsky novella. He plays Simon, a nerdily shy and self-effacing computer programmer in a grim futureworld, ignored by his employers and by co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), with whom he is hopelessly in love.
But then his carbon copy, James, arrives, also of course played by Eisenberg. James is a confident alpha-achiever who impresses his bosses and entrances Hannah – to Simon’s gibbering despair. Noah Baumbach’s brutally black-comic movie, based on his own parents’ unhappy relationship, features Eisenberg as the 16-year-old Walt, an unbearably precocious and self-important young man who has inherited all of his father’s pompous mannerisms.
His dad is Jeff Daniels, a failed novelist and creative writing professor who enviously fell out with his wife, Walt’s mother (Laura Linney), when her own writing career took off. As Walt leaves the world of childhood behind, this becomes a rare unsympathetic performance for Eisenberg in many ways, and the nerdy mannerisms for which he became famous look spiky, high-handed and charmless – yet the poignant vulnerability is clear enough. This was the teenage Eisenberg’s feature film acting debut, in which his persona of nerdiness, inexperience and bewilderment first arrived in the cinema, along with that patina of self-awareness with which all these things seemed nonetheless to be coated.
He is the high school kid Nick, appalled by his own virginity and in dire need of advice on how to make it with girls. He approaches his Lothario uncle Roger – a glorious performance from Campbell Scott – who has just been dumped by his own girlfriend, and, in a frenzy of misogynist rage, Roger takes Nick on a tour of Manhattan’s pickup joints. Eisenberg’s innocence has a charm and openness that Nick’s womaniser lacks.
In some ways, he is the opposite of his character in The Squid and the Whale. Another of the “virgin” performances with which the younger Eisenberg made his name in the indie-adjacent cinema of the 00s, and he cleverly portrays the way in which the lack of sexual experience becomes the very centre of his character’s existence. It’s a coming-of-age story about a guy called James who has gone through a prestigious undergraduate career at college; the world, supposedly, is now his oyster.
But he is still a virgin. And to earn cash for grad school he has to take a job in a scuzzy amusement park, ironically or perhaps not ironically called Adventureland, which is to provide education of a different sort and where he falls for his fellow employee, played by Kristen Stewart. It is a film and a role that would challenge any actor: Eisenberg, in full makeup and hairy costume, plays a grunting, nonverbal sasquatch loping through the empty northern California wilderness.
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