For all its awkwardness and uncertainty, the film is a city symphony, romanticyet scathing, lyrical with street life and vaulting skylines, reckless with first adventure, and awed by the intellectual and poetic abstractions on which the great machine runs.
The plaiting of fiction and personal documentary by now a classic mode of indie modernism lends extra poignancy and self-deprecation to the low-key romantic agonies and financial struggles of ambitious yet uncertain bohemians.