This year’s Toronto International Film Festival featured the premieres of several notable actors’ directorial debuts. Some were obvious vanity projects. Others were genuine surprises. The rest were fine but pretty forgettable. Maude Apatow’s first feature, Poetic License, is sadly one of the latter. 

The film is a gentle and well-meaning comedy that follows Leslie Mann (Apatow’s mother in real life) as Liz, a mother and wife whose husband (Method Man) accepts a new job as an economics professor. The couple and their teenage daughter, Dora (Nico Parker), must relocate to a small college town, where Liz decides to audit a poetry class at the same school to fill her time. After Liz meets Ari (Cooper Hoffman) and Sam (Andrew Barth Feldman), two very different but very good longtime friends, both develop an infatuation with Liz that she can’t help but be flattered by. 

Feeling incredibly stuck in life and like she doesn’t have something of her own outside of her family, Liz begins to develop a real bond with these young men, while their animosity for and competition with each other intensify. It’s essentially Challengers, but with an older woman, no tennis, and less exciting. 

The best part of Poetic License is easily the cast, who inject much-needed energy into what would otherwise be a staid and predictable screenplay. Cooper Hoffman is a standout as a self-absorbed college student who thinks he knows better than everyone else. Instead of making the character unlikable, which would have been very easy to do, Hoffman lays on enough charm that the audience can’t help but love him. Andrew Barth Feldman is also excellent here. His character is completely buttoned up in contrast to Ari, and it makes for some great back-and-forth between the two young actors. 

When it comes to Leslie Mann, she excels with the material she’s given, but Liz is a character too thinly written for Mann to truly take flight. The script shies away from a lot of the interesting ideas it presents, so there’s never an opportunity for her to sink her teeth into anything meaty. While it’s hard not to see watered-down versions of characters she has already played in many other movies–ones often directed by her husband (and Maude’s father), Judd Apatow–Mann is still able to make the most out of a lacklustre role, bringing her classic warmth and luminescence to the part. 

Aside from the charismatic cast, there not much else to dig into in Poetic License. The story feels aimless, with a screenplay that’s far too hesitant and afraid to delve deeper into the ideas it serves up. The relationship dynamics between Liz, Ari and Sam are intriguing, but writer Raffi Donatich seems afraid to stick the landing after piquing our interest with the possibilities in Act One.

That said, Poetic License isn’t a bad movie. Apatow does a fine job for her first time in the director’s chair, and her experience with acting seems to add to the comfort the actors have with each other and with the material. It’s just not particularly memorable. It had the potential to be a funny comedy or even a moving coming-of-age (or middle-age) film, but it falls somewhere in the middle and is the poorer for it. With a better script, Apatow could surely level up as a director, and Poetic License will undoubtedly give her that opportunity. 

Poetic License screened as part of the 2025  Toronto International Film Festival.

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