'Frances Ha', a comedy about the misadventures of a dance student, taps 1980s indie films for its look and feel

Noah Baumbach knew exactly what he wanted when he set out to make Frances Ha. "I wanted to make a movie like a first-time director might try to make," the independent filmmaker says.

With a career stretching back to 1995's Kicking and Screaming, and including such films as The Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007) and Greenberg (2010), the 44-year-old American is far from a newbie. But he wanted to channel the innocence with which directors approach their low-budget debuts - just without the chaos. "It's very much a movie by choice and you can feel the difference."

Co-written with actress Greta Gerwig - they first worked together on Greenberg - the result is a beguiling indie comedy chronicling the misadventures of a struggling dance student, Frances (Gerwig). "I think she came from both of us," the actress says. "I don't know where she comes from but I feel very lucky that she arrived. I keep using the example of Athena springing from Zeus' head, and that's what it feels like - just fully formed. This person is here, but I don't know where they came from."

However she arrived, Frances is a remarkably relatable character - an Annie Hall for the digital generation. Much of the movie deals with the student as she bounces between apartments, failed relationships and an artistic career that's going nowhere. "The way she talks and the way she moved in the world, we both inherently understood what that was," says Gerwig - not surprising given how similar she is to her character. Both hail from Sacramento, love dance and know how hard it is to make ends meet in high-rent Manhattan.

With much of the world still recovering from a global recession, Frances Ha shows the harsh realities of trying to live an alternative lifestyle. "We wanted her economic situation to be an integrated part of the movie," says Baumbach, who grew up in Brooklyn. "In New York, you have to make money to survive there. There's a line in the movie where [Frances' friend] Sophie says, 'All the artists in New York are rich', and it's [true]. It's not good for art and it's not good for the culture."

The 30-year-old Gerwig particularly related to Frances' problems. Intending to study musical theatre, she moved east to New York, where she pursued a degree in English and philosophy at Columbia University's Barnard College. "I had a group of people, friends, and I shared a room with a girlfriend and lived in a crazy apartment," she says.

"We were paying US$350 each, but we knew how to do it. We had a support group of girlfriends. There were months where one of my friends paid my rent, and then I paid her back because we were all scraping by. If you don't have that support, it's hard to move there at 21, especially in this economy."