‘The Idea of You’ Tries to Bring Some Prestige to Fan Fiction Cinema

The Idea of You, the new Anne Hathaway romance now streaming on Prime Video, is nothing if not perfectly titled. In the movie, and presumably the novel it’s based on, the title comes from Solène (Hathaway), a 40-year-old woman expressing her doubt about a relationship with Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine) a 24-year-old pop star from a globally famous boy-band called August Moon, wondering if she liked the idea of this hot young artist more than the reality of actually being in his glamorous but high-pressure orbit. In context of the movie, at least, this doesn’t actually make a ton of sense; Solène is not, in fact, a particular fan of August Moon, and meets Hayes quite accidentally, when she stumbles into his trailer in search of a bathroom at a Coachella meet-and-greet. In one of the movie’s best details, it’s a gift from Solène’s ex-husband (Reid Scott) to their teenage daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin), who is psyched about the festival but – come on, dad! – doesn’t really care that much about August Moon as a 16-year-old anymore. They’re “so seventh-grade,” a line Solène can’t quite resist repeating in front of Hayes. (He was never Izzy’s favorite, anyway.) The film takes great pains to emphasize that Solène hasn’t previously given much thought to the idea of Hayes.

But for movie obviously inspired by real-life pop star Harry Styles, formerly of the boy band One Direction, The Idea of You is a spot-on moniker. It could easily serve as a label from fan-fiction author, addressing their subject: the idea of you, subsequently transformed into something of my own. With a growing list of movies based on fanfic, those transformations have become more complicated.

And technically speaking, The Idea of You is not fanfiction. It is based on a novel by Robinne Lee and unlike the After series of books turned movies, there wasn’t an earlier, Wattpad-posted version of it where the male lead actually is Harry Styles. (Or if there was, it’s been faithfully nuked from the internet.) It’s not unusual for fiction to take inspiration from real life, creating composite characters that may draw upon familiar figures as a form of shorthand. Lee has downplayed the direct influence Styles had on the actual story, discussing how he was a reference point as the most popular boy-bander of recent years, but not the focus of the story she wanted to tell, about a woman in her forties reclaiming her agency.

At the same time, the connections feel impossible to ignore. The very existence of the After series, which must have come up at some point in the selling and marketing of Lee’s book, means that The Idea of You will inspire thoughts of fic. Beyond that, before Lee became a published author, she was an actress – and played a role in both sequels to Fifty Shades of Grey, a book-turned-film trilogy whose source material began life as, you guessed it, Twilight fanfic.

Twilight seems like the ur-text for all of these variations, whether their creators had Bella and Edward in mind or not: Fifty Shades, After, and The Idea of You are all about an unassuming woman who doesn’t think of herself as being especially desirable having her beauty and specialness affirmed by some kind of chosen figure of glammed-up danger, be it sparkling vampire, mischievously handsome pop star, or just kind of a handsome dick. By casting Hathaway and addressing the way that society tends to underestimate or outright discard women in their forties, The Idea of You immediately rises to the top of this questionable subgenre. But it still plays more or less like fanfic, in that it feels engineered to flatter and pacify both its characters and its audience; it’s still a movie where Anne Hathaway never looks less than absolutely luminous while the story scrounges around for reasons her character should be insecure. (At one point it settles on “thin enough at 40 that being as chesty as a buxom 22-year-old isn’t necessarily an option.” Poor Solène!) It’s really searching for romantic complication, as every bone in its body aches for simple wish-fulfillment.

Even the movie’s version of an inarguably hellish aspect of dating someone like Harry Styles – facing cruel online scrutiny – feels weirdly out-of-date. After a secret whirlwind fling on tour, Solène and Hayes try to make a go of a real relationship, and soon the public knows about them – which somehow revives out-of-style 2000s-era nasty-gossip blogs like PerezHilton.com. Sure, Hilton and his site still exist, but is it really on the forefront of celebrity harassment in 2024? Wouldn’t the real harassment come from stan armies posting about how Solène must be grooming Hayes? For that matter, how many boy bands are not just a going concern but wildly popular for nearly a decade, the way August Moon seems to be? One Direction was together for six years, NSYNC had seven, and that includes their early formation eras. For a boy band, five years of nonstop hits is an eternity – making a seamless, bumpless late-movie time-jump even more galling.

These are nitpicks, to be sure (as is the sad fact that Hayes Campbell’s sensitive-musician solo material just sounds like singer-songwriter Jack Johnson; seriously, if not for the existence of smartphones I could have mistaken this for a 2003 period piece). They’re also what makes The Idea of You feel so much more like fanfic than a story that actually engages with the realities of pop stardom, age-gap relationships, and the changes in a single woman’s life as she ages out of the designated hot zone. Yes, the characters talk a little bit about the rage directed at happy women, especially when they’re over a certain age, as well as the loneliness that even successful women may feel because of this treatment. There are moments, too, when director Michael Showalter allows the characters some visual intimacy with his lighting and blocking choices. But apart from the clumsiness of frequently reciting this rather than dramatizing the movie’s thematic concerns, even the movie’s melancholy little concessions feed back into a fantasy of wealth and self-congratulation not too far removed from Nancy Meyers cinema.

In a sense, fanfic is a richer tradition than its relatively recent connection to movies lets on; speaking of Meyers, she has endless self-insert moments in her own movies, as do plenty of other writer-directors. It’s not an illegitimate technique. Artists will always try their hand and writing and rewriting the stories they might have liked to see in life, but couldn’t. It’s one reason that romantic fantasy, even naked wish-fulfillment, can still be touching onscreen. But The Idea of You narrows many of its characters as it goes along, snapping them off when they don’t quite bend to the fantasy, and denying itself the intoxicating fun of actual fandom. (The moments where mom and daughter rock out to St. Vincent feel more unbridled than anything else having to do with music in the whole enterprise.) The movie isn’t nearly as absurd as Fifty Shades or After, yet it doesn’t seem to quite understand that what was laughable about those movies wasn’t the characters’ youth, but their paper-thin flimsiness. For all of the movie’s supposed seriousness, Hathaway, a wonderful actress, is playing a character as dimensionalized as a bookmark, an idea of a person to slip between whatever pages the author pleases.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.