There is nary a more effective way to show that your film is set in 2011 than to start on a close up of a BlackBerry then needle drop Sky Ferreira’s “Everything Is Embarrassing.”

Alexandra Pechman’s feature debut Magazine is a post-mumblecore, pre-#MeToo repository of the NYC literary scene in the ever so seminal millennial optimism era. It follows Nora (Lily McInerny), a young aspiring poet who lands an internship at Platen, proclaimed the most prestigious lit mag in the country. She spends her days reading slush pile submissions and doing the usual intern grunt work while trying to navigate the office’s social hierarchy, power dynamics, and workplace romances.

What I liked about Nora is that she isn’t cynical about any of this— incredibly refreshing to see amongst the irony-poisoned writing we’ve grown accustomed to now. McInerny plays her with so much grace that the character never becomes the usual wide-eyed ingenue who exists to be humbled by the big apple. There’s still a level of naivete, but it never feels like we’re being asked to feel bad for Nora for being young and feeble. It’s a real tender performance, and I got the sense that Pechman and McInerny put a lot of care and intention into figuring out who Nora was before putting her on screen.

That kind of earnestness feels more conspicuous now, which may explain why we’re suddenly getting more films that treat the 2010s as a period piece. Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks comes to mind. It’s aligned with the resurgence of the millennial optimism trend making the rounds online again, which feels like the inevitable pendulum swing after all of our collective doomerism. Y2K has apparently been strip-mined for all remaining nostalgia, so we’re moving on to the sleaze age. 

But what people seem to miss isn’t really the period itself but the psychic conditions of being young in it when there was still some plausible deniability around adulthood. You could be broke and 20, move to New York, take an unpaid internship, and convince yourself you were on the way to becoming a writer rather than slowly professionalizing your own exploitation. Magazine gets at that optimism because Nora isn’t performing ambition, she genuinely thinks her life might become something and I love that for her. After years of being told to expect collapse, precarity and increasingly creative forms of economic humiliation, earnest optimism is weirdly countercultural. We’ve become so accustomed to irony as a prophylactic against disappointment that watching someone as earnest as Nora is palate cleansing.

The film itself takes a little longer to find its rhythm. Some of the early exchanges between Nora and her new coworkers have a stiffness to them that made me wonder if the dialogue would continue feeling slightly rehearsed. Luckily it doesn’t, and as the film opens up, the performances and relationships become much more naturalistic and convincing. Jake Lacy is pitch perfect as the metrosexual literary-world prince who wears exclusively white pants, Daniel Zolghadri’s Leonard is the ultimate indie sleaze curmudgeon, and Ruby Cruz is really sweet as twee supreme Greer, outperforming all the interns in Zooey Deschanel drag. However, I was very thrown off by Delaney Rowe’s character, who is exactly the early-2010s female archetype that Rowe is famous for impersonating on TikTok. Thankfully, she has <10 minutes of screen time. 

Still, I found myself getting increasingly attached to the movie as Nora started getting attached to Platen. There’s a montage of her finding her place at the magazine set to The Strokes’ “I’ll Try Anything Once” that should be unbearably on-the-nose but instead it’s perfect. I really wanted Nora to have a good time, have good sex, get the job, and for these people to become her real friends.

The sexual politics at Platen are obviously part of Nora’s experience, and by contemporary standards, the office is an HR nightmare. But I was relieved that Pechman doesn’t make any of it the entire point of the movie. Nora’s clandestine relationship with her boss Thomas (Joshua Melnick) matters, but he doesn’t become the great explanatory force of her life. Nora has a lust for life outside of him, and, more importantly, a lust for life outside of the men at Platen. Her relationships with the other interns are ultimately much more interesting. Leonard, Greer, and Tabitha (Lukita Maxwell) give the movie more texture, and the friendship forming between the interns becomes the closest thing the film has to a real love story.

And really, not much more happens than that. Magazine is essentially a slice-of-one summer in Nora’s life, which mirrors a line from Lacy’s character about what each issue of Platen sets to accomplish, “a snapshot of a single moment in time.” There’s no grand reckoning waiting for Nora at the end of it. She comes to New York, fucks the wrong guy, makes some friends, gets her feelings hurt, learns a little about the industry she wants to enter, and goes home slightly less naive than she arrived.

In that way, it feels spiritually close to the millennial coming-of-age movies that were being made around that time like Tiny Furniture and Frances Ha, but Magazine’s take on those days does feel particularly of-the-moment. We’re currently romanticizing an era that didn’t necessarily have better answers, just a greater willingness to believe there might be answers eventually.