Noah Baumbach's black-and-white Brooklyn comedy. Greta Gerwig's career-defining lead. The screenplay she co-wrote with Baumbach.
New York and assorted other locations, contemporary. Frances Halladay is a 27-year-old apprentice dancer with a small modern-dance company in Brooklyn. She lives with her best friend Sophie in a Brooklyn apartment they have shared for years. The film opens on Sophie's announcement that she is moving out — she has accepted a Manhattan apartment that, in Brooklyn-rent terms, Frances cannot afford to maintain alone. Frances is suddenly unmoored from the structural foundation that has sustained her adult life.
The film tracks Frances across approximately six months as she progressively loses her apartment, her dance-company position, her relationship with Sophie, and the broader social-financial scaffolding her late-twenties had assumed. She moves between multiple temporary accommodations — including a brief return to her parents' house in Sacramento, a brief stint at her former university in Poughkeepsie, a brief trip to Paris that she cannot afford. The film closes with Frances finally securing a small Manhattan apartment of her own, a position teaching choreography rather than performing, and a partial reconciliation with Sophie at a small dance recital.
Frances Ha is, in some sense, the work that established Greta Gerwig as a major working figure in American independent cinema. Gerwig had been a working actress in indie productions through the late 2000s (Hannah Takes the Stairs 2007, Greenberg 2010, both with Baumbach in different capacities) but had not, before Frances Ha, secured a starring role at the level the character would require.
What's structurally significant is that Gerwig also co-wrote the screenplay with Baumbach. The two were, by the time of production, in a romantic relationship (they have subsequently had a child together and remain partners); the co-writing credit represented Gerwig's first major screenwriting work. Her subsequent solo-direction films — Lady Bird (2017), Little Women (2019), Barbie (2023) — all extended the screenwriting-and-performance partnership the Frances Ha credit established. See our Greta Gerwig director profile for the broader trajectory.
The film's most-quoted sequence is Frances running through New York streets to David Bowie's 'Modern Love.' The sequence runs approximately ninety seconds. Frances is running — sometimes leaping, sometimes spinning, sometimes simply running through pedestrians — across multiple New York locations cut together as a montage. The choreography is openly that of the actress performing rather than of any specific character motivation; the audience reads the sequence as a moment of structural joy that the surrounding narrative does not directly explain.
The sequence is, in some sense, the film's argument. Frances's life is collapsing across the runtime in specific economic and social terms; the running-to-Bowie sequence is the film's structural acknowledgement that her interior life nonetheless contains genuine joy that the financial-social difficulties have not displaced. The sequence has been imitated extensively across subsequent indie cinema (the broader Gerwig-Baumbach approach to integrating non-diegetic music with character movement has become a recognisable contemporary convention) but rarely matched in execution. The musical-licensing alone reportedly consumed a substantial portion of the film's modest production budget.
Frances Ha is shot in black-and-white. The choice was, in 2012, structurally unusual. Sam Levy's cinematography produces a specific Brooklyn that is recognisably contemporary (the iPhones, the social-media references, the broader Brooklyn-coffee-shop aesthetic the film documents) but visually distinct from the conventional colour-representation of the same setting. The black-and-white framing locates the film in a structural conversation with mid-20th-century New York cinema (Annie Hall, Manhattan, parts of Sweet Smell of Success) without committing to actual period-drama framing.
What this allows the film to do is operate as both contemporary Brooklyn comedy and as a structural homage to the broader New York-cinema tradition. The argument is, in some sense, that Frances's specific late-twenties Brooklyn situation is part of a longer tradition of young-adult-New-York-cinema — and that the contemporary economic-housing reality her character navigates is, structurally, in conversation with the housing-and-friendship material that previous generations of New York cinema have engaged.