Adam Driver wears a Casio

On a Manhattan sidewalk in Noah Baumbach's While We're Young, a fortysomething documentary filmmaker named Josh, played by Ben Stiller, gets pulled into the orbit of a much younger couple, and the younger man is the reason. Jamie, played by Adam Driver, is everything Josh secretly wants to be again: a filmmaker in an olive fedora and a distressed leather jacket, treating obsolete things as a way of life. He rides a fixed-gear bike, plays vinyl, makes his own ice cream. The whole performance of analog authenticity turns out to be calculated social climbing, and Jamie is the most ruthless operator in a film full of people anxious about getting older.

The costume sells the pose down to the wrist. Where Josh and Cornelia carry the trappings of middle-aged comfort, Jamie wears the cheap, indifferent gear of someone who wants you to believe he does not care about objects at all, and a plain Casio reads exactly that way, disposable and unfussy, another curated prop alongside the records and the bike. The model never resolves clearly on screen, so the brand is as far as it goes. There is a joke buried in the casting anyway. Adam Driver, who plays the man performing his contempt for nice things, is in real life a Breitling ambassador.