Film Review: The Idea of You is more than an age-gap treatise

Nicholas Galitzine and Anne Hathaway star in The Idea Of You

• The Idea of You 
• ★★★★☆
• Prime Video

The Idea of You (12A) stars Anne Hathaway as Solène, a gallery owner about to turn 40 who meets boyband superstar Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine) whilst chaperoning her teenage daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin) at a music festival.

The 24-year-old Hayes isn’t quite half Solène’s age, although he’s certainly young enough, and reminds Solène of how devastated she was when her ex-husband, Daniel (Reid Scott), ran off with a woman half his age.

But when Hayes turns up unannounced at Solène’s gallery to buy her entire stock, and then invites her to join the band on their European tour — well, what’s a red-blooded woman to do?

Slickly directed by Michael Showalter, The Idea of You turns the age-gap question on its head in a fairytale-like romance that also delivers plenty of gags and one-liners (at one point Solène is denounced by a boyband fan as ‘Yoko Ono 2.0’).

But the movie isn’t simply a treatise about appropriate age difference. 

Hathaway and Galitzine make for a terrific pairing, both of them playing characters with trust issues at play behind their meticulously crafted public personas: Hayes is a sensitive and misunderstood soul behind his on-stage crotch-grabbing antics (no, really, etc), while Solène is still processing her ex-husband’s betrayal. 

All told, it’s a very satisfying romantic drama.