Hannah Takes the Stairs

Director: Joe Swanberg

2007 / 83min / DCP

Years before she became the billion-dollar Barbie girl, Greta Gerwig was perhaps mumblecore’s invaluable utility player, taking on the title role in Swanberg’s largely improvised third feature alongside a cast round out by an all-star lineup of filmmakers/actors, including Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass, Kent Osborne, and Ry Russo-Young, playing a coterie of young Chicagoans clumsily feeling taking their first steps into adulthood. “Swanberg focuses on a narrow slice of reality, a slender patch of urban-postgrad turf, but he observes it intimately and passionately; few intellectual characters speak as articulately, and elaborate their feelings as plausibly, as his Hannah.” —The New Yorker