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One of the big gets of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise is LCD Soundsystem’s first new music in five years. The menacingly upbeat soundtrack original, “New Body Rhumba,” is a cockeyed delight — one of the year’s best singles — and Baumbach makes a point to show it off. He doesn’t give into the custom of unimaginatively tossing a made-for-the-movie track over the closing credits. Instead, he effectively makes the last seven and a half minutes of the movie into a music video, the film’s ensemble and a pack of extras gamely boogying around a grocery store as if transported suddenly into a Stanley Donen musical. The sequence is a joy when taken on its own. But when placed in the context of the movie it feels especially indicative of why the film fails to ever find real coherence or emotional authenticity. It’s one of many segments that while individually delightful also has a way of making things feel only more scattershot as it contributes to the larger picture.

Based on Dom DeLillo’s acclaimed, long-considered “impossible to adapt” 1985 novel, White Noise takes place in a shinily aestheticized version of the decade in which it was written. It follows Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a middle-aged professor at the fictional College-on-the-Hill academically famous for pioneering “Hitler studies.” He and his dutiful, mostly stay-at-home wife, the big-haired Babette (Greta Gerwig), have a combined four kids from different marriages save for the house’s youngest; a deep fear of their own mortality instills in them both a profound dread that won’t improve much in the chaotic year we spend in them. (The film’s centerpiece comes from an entire act devoted to an “airborne toxic event” that both puts the Gladneys in the kind of situation putting you in mind of the early overtures of an apocalypse thriller and amps up their existential unease.) 

Read the full review on 425.