TIFF 2025 Review: Poetic License – “absolutely delightful.”

Courtesy of TIFF

It’s hard not to think about Maude Apatow‘s directorial debut, Poetic License, without thinking about her father, Judd Apatow’s iconic comedies.  Yet, even though this is a family affair, starring her mother, Leslie Mann, we need to give credit where credit is due.  While Maude Apatow proves that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, it would be unfair to think this film isn’t anything but distinctly hers since she clearly stands so well on her own two, very competent, feet.

Liz (Mann) has just moved to a small college town with her professor husband (Cliff ‘Method Man’ Smith) and daughter Dora (Nico Parker).  Dora is just going into her last year of high school, and with the change in location, Liz is having a rough time coming to terms with the fact that she’s soon to be an empty nester in a town where she knows no one.  Having left her job as a therapist behind in Chicago when they moved, Liz decides to audit a poetry class at the college.

It’s in that class she meets Ari (Cooper Hoffman) and Sam (Andrew Barth Feldman), two friends who take an interest in their older classmate.  At a time when Dora seems to be more distant and is making new friends, Liz finds comfort in the attention the young men afford her and reconnects with a side of herself that has been missing.  In her adult life, she’s always had the label of ‘therapist,’ ‘wife’ or ‘mom’, and without those things, Liz is forced to forge a path of her own. Now with her new companions, just themselves on the verge of adulthood, they are figuring out their futures together, with some unexpected antics and complications along the way.

One of the nicest parts of Poetic License is seeing Leslie Mann as the lead, having a role she can really sink her teeth into.  So often she is not given her dues, playing the wife, or the friend in underdeveloped parts.  Not the case here.  Liz has depth and history, written well by Raffi Donatich.  Her character arc is satisfying, if predictable, but the comedy along the way is satisfying and Mann embraces this leading role with empathy and just the right amount of neurotic tendency.

But none of this works without the chemistry between Hoffman and Feldman as best friends.  The two are also friends in real life (and worked together in 2024’s Saturday Night), and their comfort with one another comes across on screen.  They have an easy give and take, a fun way of trading banter, that counts for many of the movie’s numerous laughs.  The way that Feldman delivers some of his lines is just perfection.

Apatow, like her father, might make this film a little too long, but the cast is enjoyable enough to forgive the slight overreach (it does come in at just less than two hours, so she’s doing much better than her dad in this respect).  This absolutely delightful movie doesn’t just lean on one-liners, but instead finds humour in the everyday, and builds on the cringeworthy without ever being truly cringey itself.  It really looks at what it looks like to feel anxious about your future, whether you’re in your twenties or you’re… older than that.  What Poetic License does so well is embrace awkwardness, fully and without abandon.  I can’t wait to watch it again.

Poetic License had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival September 6, 2025.  For more information head to tiff.net