‘When You Finish Saving the World’ Review: Jesse Eisenberg’s War of the Woke
variety.comAmy Nicholson To see 17-year-old Ziggy Katz (Finn Wolfhard) on the street, you’d think he was a decent kid. He says no to drugs, he livestreams milquetoast folk songs that rhyme “foggy” and “doggy,” and he’s even comfortable sporting a pink knitted hat because gender stereotypes are so last generation.
Alas, Ziggy has the rotten luck to be trapped in Jesse Eisenberg’s bleak debut “When You Finish Saving the World” where he’s surrounded by sin-counting idealists in a liberal midwestern bubble who consider the fame-seeking teen to be as unenlightened as the hairspray heads who once swaggered down the Sunset Strip — a claustrophobic mockery of do-gooderism that expands upon and simplifies Eisenberg’s 2020 time-bending audio drama of the same name.
In this unnamed Indiana town, Ziggy’s crush Lila (Alisha Boe), a poet who writes ballads against the colonialist occupation of the Marshall Islands, dismisses him as a moron.
His dad (Jay O. Sanders) thinks of him as a statistic, another self-centered upper-middle class boy cluttering up the planet.
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