In Tiny Furniture, Aura (Lena Dunham), a recently single college grad returns home to her mother’s TriBeCa loft with no idea what comes next. While her mother and over achieving younger sister are off touring colleges, Aura takes in Jed (Alex Karpovsky), a broke, YouTube comic ‘celebrity’ on a so-called business trip. Aura is too busy with her own self-pity to mind Jed leeching off of her kindness, nor does she recognize that she is really just allowing him to leech off her mother. Instead, she wastes her days working as a hostess at a restaurant around the corner, taking reservations and flirting with Keith (David Call) whose enthusiasm for prescription drugs and pornography should be sufficient red flags to prompt any self- respecting individual to run away.

Typically, I wouldn’t have much sympathy for a character like Dunham’s; she is a privileged young woman prone to complaining about her lack of direction in life, but Dunham’s performance does draw me in. Her character may not be very likable, but she feels real, and while there are surely more dramatic topics to explore, I admire that this filmmaker wasn’t trying to tell a story she didn’t know, but rather, took the risk of creating a work that was close to home, albeit somewhat self-indulgent.

Herself a recent college graduate and the daughter of a successful artist, the character of Aura is pretty close to home for Dunham. The charged moments between mother and daughter owe their authenticity to the fact that the onscreen mother is Dunham’s real life mother, artist Laurie Simmons, so too are her sister and high school friend. The performances she captures are singed with reality, but it isn’t lazy casting; it is a wise choice for a director who doesn’t have access to more experienced talent.

Still, one can’t escape the fact that the film has no narrative of value. It is simply a moment in a young woman’s life. It is a time marked by confusion, self-centeredness and dejection. The young woman herself is not exceptional or sympathetic, and neither is the film, but it did make me wonder what well-educated young people are likely to do once they are out of academia. Aura’s predicament doesn’t seem that unusual these days as more and more people rely on their parents for money, food and shelter well into their twenties. It seems like most people graduate with hardly any real life skills and some transitional dependence upon their parents is necessary in order to get them up to speed with the responsibilities of making it to work on time and the nuances of online bill paying.

So what should we expect from recent college grads? Poor economy aside, do we expect them to buy homes? Travel? Get married? Party? Have kids? What is the ideal we should present to young people? While rigid cultural roles may seem restrictive, this film illustrates just how bad it can be when there are no goals or role models. And with that in mind, I am impressed that Lena Dunham wrote, directed and starred in her own film.