Graduating from college comes with an overwhelming ennui that leads graduates to believe we are being utterly underutilized in a society that can’t appreciate our over-education. We’re entitled to everything because, after all, we know everything there is to know about life. Tiny Furniture, which won best narrative feature at SXSW 2010, is about learning that we actually don’t know anything except nobody else (including our successful friends and parents) knows anything either.

Dunham is Aura, a recent graduate from a prestigious liberal arts college who returns home to live in her mother’s shwanky loft in Tribeca, New York. She hates living at home, as it contains her artsy mother (Laurie Simmons) and her obnoxious younger sister (Grace Dunham), but knows the arrangement is only until she gets an apartment with her best college friend (Merritt Wever). Until then, it’s job hunting and catching up with peers, who all seem to have their lives on the road to being sorted out. Surrounded by the young, artistic and sardonic, Aura is forced to ponder whether she should be creating, reading, meeting people, or joining the work force regimen. In the meantime, she’d much rather sulk. Her only apparent modicum of comfort  comes from Charlotte (Jemima Kirke), a childhood friend with a maybe-British accent who concerns herself with none of these details. Continue reading “Rack Focus Review: Tiny Furniture”