White Noise movie review: Noah Baumbach’s Don DeLillo adaptation finds the fun in fatalism

A disarming adaptation of Don DeLillo’s prescient, “unfilmable”, cult novel, Noah Baumbach’s latest finds the fun in fatalism. Focusing on unnatural disasters, the film is practically the equal and opposite of another Netflix offering, Don’t Look Up. The message there is “Act Now And We Can Still Save The Planet!” The take-away from White Noise is: “Oh, we’re so doomed. Let’s dance!”

It’s the 1980s and professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), is teaching “Hitler Studies”, at a Midwestern college. Jack (imagine a bonny hybrid of Slavoj Zizek and Chris Morris) wears sunglasses. He deconstructs the rock ‘n’ roll nature of fascism and, in the small pond of academia, is a bit of a rock star himself.

Jack’s fourth wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), is nominally in charge of their large, blended family, but, for all her zesty smiles, seems zonked. When a “toxic airborne event” forces the Gladneys to vacate their house, Jack realises his cushy existence is not what it seems.

In the first two thirds of the movie, Gerwig and Driver (co-stars in Baumbach’s 2012 left-field gem, Frances Ha), are as edgily magnetic as you’d expect. Even when referring to his wife in the third person, Driver’s Jack is cute rather than creepy, while one of Babette’s sweetest moments sees her hiding under a sheet, like an overwhelmed tot.

As for Baumbach (who remains best known for Marriage Story, his naturalistic, dizzily tender dissection of a divorce), he’s full of pep and miles from his comfort zone. He throws in horror-movie-style jump scares and, when the Gladneys hit the road in their Chevrolet, Spielbergian hi-jinx. The air of mad-cap menace, as the quarantined family encounter extremists plagued by deja vu, is so true to DeLillo’s pulpily cerebral masterpiece that it made me want to cheer.

If the third act offers less to shout about (significantly different from the book, it manages to be both pretentious and facile), the finale puts things right. One of Jack’s favourite haunts is a well-stocked supermarket, a place his best friend, Murray (Don Cheadle; sublime), describes as a “sacred space”. As New Body Rhumba, a new song from LCD Soundsystem, blares from the supermarket’s loudspeakers, minor and major characters shimmy towards the check-out. In a poignant, fluorescent-coloured freak out, shopping collides with bopping. God is goods!

I don’t buy everything about Baumbach’s opus, but consuming this is bliss.

136mins, cert 15

In cinemas from December 2 and on Netflix from December 30