It’s fitting that Jesse Eisenberg’s often smart but far too obvious and ultimately flat “When You Finish Saving the World” is hitting theaters just as the Sundance Film Festival is opening, for this is a very Sundance-y film: a small and precisely calculated character study about an upper middle-class family that would consider itself to be enlightened and engaged with the world but actually is wallowing in narcissism.
In fact, “When You Finish …,” based on Eisenberg’s audio play of the same name, debuted last year at Sundance, which often serves as a showcase for actors making their directorial debuts, e.g., Rebecca Hall (“Passing”), Bo Burnham (“Eighth Grade”) and Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman.”) Set in an unnamed college town in Indiana, “When You Finish Saving the World” stars Finn Wolfhard (“Stranger Things”) as Ziggy, a teenage viral video singer who has 20,000 followers (as he keeps reminding people) and has grown up in a liberal albeit chilly home with his parents Evelyn, who works at a women’s shelter even though she seems unfamiliar with the concept of empathy, and Roger (Jay O. Sanders), an academic who is always buried in a book or a newspaper and is prone to lecturing Ziggy about how it would be wrong for a white suburban kid to play the blues.
