About Frances Ha
A twenty-seven-year-old apprentice dancer in New York whose best friend is moving out and whose career is not really starting tries to keep up appearances across Brooklyn, Sacramento, and a brief weekend in Paris she absolutely cannot afford. Greta Gerwig in black-and-white scored to David Bowie.
Released in 2012 and running a tight 1h 26m, Frances Ha sits firmly in the comedy tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated R and presented in English. Read a contemporary review — useful before you book a ticket.
Director: Noah Baumbach
Noah Baumbach belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Frances Ha is part of that pipeline. If you have responded to this film, the director's other available titles in our catalog are listed in the sidebar; Noah Baumbach's filmography rewards sustained attention.
Cast
The principal cast — Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception. Cast notes and credits are useful for tracking through other adjacent indie work.
Where to watch Frances Ha
Currently playing in 12 US cities across our directory. The deepest scheduling is in:
- San Francisco, CA — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Seattle, WA — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Brooklyn, NY — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Cleveland, OH — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Northfield, NJ — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- New Orleans, LA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Fredonia, NY — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Saint Paul, MN — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Fairfax, VA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Kingston, WA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Millbury, MA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Philadelphia, PA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory, or browse the next seven days of showtimes for last-minute additions.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Frances Ha is a clean fit for that model: a 1h 26m comedy work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas listed in the schedule above are the venues currently doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Comedy genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition. Programmer notes are sometimes the fastest way to triangulate which other films share a sensibility.