Three people walk into a poetry class and walk out with their lives delightfully, disastrously entangled.
Marking the confident directorial debut of Maude Apatow (Euphoria), this sharp-eyed college-set gem captures that fleeting moment in life when everything feels possible, deeply confusing, and just a little bit unhinged.
Ari (Cooper Hoffman from Licorice Pizza) and Sam (Andrew Barth Feldman from No Hard Feelings) are longtime friends nearing graduation, bound together despite wildly different temperaments. Ari is impulsive, charming, and allergic to self-reflection; Sam is disciplined, cautious, and already rehearsing his future in finance. Their carefully balanced dynamic is upended by Liz (played by a luminous Leslie Mann, of This is 40 and Knocked Up fame), a married mother auditing their poetry class after relocating to town with her husband and struggling to reconnect—with herself, her daughter, and the version of life she once imagined. What begins as an unlikely friendship spirals into emotional chaos when both young men fall hard for Liz, igniting rivalries, revelations, and a series of gloriously awkward missteps.
What Poetic License understands—beautifully--is that college isn’t just about youth; it’s one of the last spaces where age, ambition, and expectation blur long enough for genuine connection to spark. With wit, compassion, and a poet’s ear for human contradiction, the film explores desire, reinvention, and the strange freedom that comes from not knowing what’s next. Laugh-out-loud funny and quietly moving, Poetic License is a pitch-perfect film: generous, alive, and bursting with that electric sense that everything is still up for grabs.