The 10 Most Annoying Hipster Characters In Movies

Image via Complex Original

If there ever was a hipster queen, it would be Lena Dunham, which has been made apparent thanks to her HBO series Girls. But one look at Dunham’s 2009 debut film, Tiny Furniture, puts Hannah and company practically in the same yuppie category as the cast of Gossip Girl. Warning: The plot description that follows may result in severe eye strain, because you’ll likely be rolling them a lot.

In the movie, Dunham stars as Aura, a recent graduate of a university in Ohio (probably Oberlin, as that’s where Dunham herself attended) who returns home to New York City to live with her mother and teenage sister until she can find a job. What follows is 90 minutes of Aura basically complaining about post-grad life and how she’s “having a very hard time.” This all happens despite the fact that she seems to have had no significant traumatic experiences, her mother is a rich artist, and she lives in a gigantic loft in Tribeca that most people would literally kill for.

The "too long, didn’t read" version? It’s #whitegirlproblems, the movie.

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) isn’t the quintessential hipster that you might see if you spend about, say, 10 seconds in Brooklyn, but that doesn’t make him any less of one. He’s just more subtle about it.

See, Tom grew up listening to hipster music, so as an adult he's left with this exaggerated, romanticized view on love. He subscribes to the belief that he will never be truly happy unless he finds someone to love as fiercely as Morrissey did when he wrote the lyrics “to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.” So deep!

When he meets Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and she is able to identify that very Smiths song he’s listening to on his (of course) old-school headphones, it’s, in his eyes, love at first sight. Tom believes that just because Summer is a hot girl who shares his pretentious tastes in music, films, books, and art in a city like Los Angeles—with its endless amount of bottle blondes who think that Flo Rida is quality music—she’s his soulmate. As a normal, healthy relationship seems sub-standard to him, he expects a grand love story to follow, and feels betrayed when it doesn’t.

The audience is then subjected to about an hour of Tom remembering the good and the bad of his relationship with Summer before he finally realizes, at end of the film, that shared interests aren’t enough to build a foundation upon. Then, just when you think he’s made a breakthrough, Tom meets a girl named Autumn (Minka Kelly) who shares his love of architecture, and you can almost see the hearts appear behind his kind, sensitive eyes. Thankfully, the film ends before he gets the chance to ask her if they can compare record collections. 

There’s no question that Lucas is a hipster. He, like many of his kind, works at a record store and judges people to hell and back if they don’t share his taste in music, all very typical and irritating in their own way, of course.

However, that's not what makes him particularly annoying, not to mention an awful person. What makes him an annoying and awful person is the fact that he ends up fucking up a major deal to sell the record store he works in to a chain of music stores, Music Town, all because he doesn't want to work for "the man," which in this case would be a large corporation that could potentially offer him and his co-workers more financial benefits than any independent business could. All for his principles. 

The best part, though is how he fucks up the deal. When he discovers that the store is in danger of being sold and that his manager, Joe (Anthony LaPaglia), is interested in buying the store from the owner rather than having it sold to Music Town, Lucas decides it'd be a great idea to take the money that Joe's been saving (total: $9,000) and gamble it in an effort to double it. Unsurprisingly, he loses it all.

If you're going to screw up a major deal that could benefit a whole group of employees just because you don't want to be an employee in a large company, don't do it with the money some poor guy's been saving to do the same thing you're doing. That's just called being an awful person. Even the Occupy Wall Street guys would hate this dude. 

Though pretty much everyone in this film is a hipster, with the exception of perhaps a couple of hobos and one hot cheerleader-type named Tris (Alexis Dziena), no character in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is as annoying Nick (Michael Cera). 

A teenager living in Hoboken, New Jersey, who's the "straight bass player" in an “all-gay band,” the film opens with him all but crying into his phone as he pleads with his ex-girlfriend Tris' voicemail for her to take him back and reveals that he made her another mixtape, because that's how hipsters show their love. Tris, predictably, doesn't really give a shit about him, but that doesn't stop Nick from pining over her for practically two-thirds of the film, despite the fact that the very hot Norah (Kat Dennings) is clearly pining for him.

Sure, part of Norah's attraction is based on the fact that they both like the same obscure band and they're "musical soulmates," but that's still better than watching Michael Cera make sad puppy dog eyes at a girl who's so clearly out of his league. 

Unlike a lot of the films on this list, Ruby Sparks was made by people who were well aware of what it is. Rather than being just more fodder for hipster culture that seems to promote only judging others and forming relationships based on shared interests in music, film, and books, the movie unapologetically criticizes characters and plots that have those elements. It may be wrapped in a seemingly hipster promotional campaign, but don't get it twisted: We shouldn't be rooting for the protagonist Calvin (Paul Dano). Not until the end of the film, anyway.

Calvin is a novelist struggling with severe writer's block until, at the behest of his therapist, he creates the character of Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan, who also wrote the script). She's his perfect woman. The more he writes of her, the more he falls for her, despite the fact that she isn't real. But really, can you blame him? She's everything he thinks he wants, his ideal, and she's got a demeanor that's brighter than a ball of sunshine to boot. Then, by some stroke of magic, he wakes up one morning to find that she's a real person, and he's in a relationship with her. Calvin aslo has the power to control her through his writing. He is, literally, in a relationship with a woman that he created.

Which would be perfect if, like many of the characters on this list seem to believe, relationships could be created and sustained from mutual interests. As Calvin finds out, though, that's far from the case. Even though he can control her, the relationship suffers until Calvin eventually writes that she is not his own creation in an effort to set her free. 

Though he appeared in Reality Bites long before anyone even knew what a hipster was, there's no doubt about it: Troy Dyer (Ethan Hawke) is a total hipster. Let's look at the clues: He’s a coffeehouse guitarist in a band that covers Violent Femmes songs, which is named Hey, That's My Bike! He talks darkly and deeply about Quarter Pounders with Cheese. He has no real job to speak of, and seems to flit from one minimum wage job to the next. Still, somehow, he's not homeless. It's all for the sake of the art, man. 

He’s also an asshole, especially to his best friend Lelaina (Winona Ryder)'s new boyfriend, simply because he's a suit who works in television. Putting aside how it's grade-A asshole behavior to judge a person based simply because they're not all deep about cheeseburgers like you are, Troy seems to show no regard for how Lelaina might feel about him being a dick to the guy she's dating. Of course, his actions are only masking the deeper, romantic feelings he feels for Lelaina, but insecurity is no excuse for that. 

To be fair, the title of "annoying hipster" could be given to most of Zooey Deschanel’s characters. She typically plays the quirky, indie girl with a penchant for alternative music, art house films, cutesy vintage clothes, and deep thoughts, despite never having experienced a moment of hardship in her life past the time her computer deleted her entire iTunes playlist because she accidentally clicked "Sync" when she plugged in her iPod. And hey, more power to her. Hell, she now stars in a whole TV show about it (New Girl). But does that mean we won’t judge relentlessly? Of course not.

So, meet Allison. There was a lot wrong with the 2008 Jim Carrey-starring film Yes Man, but Deschanel’s Allison seemed to stand out in the worst ways possible. For one, she fronted a weird, indie/techno/electronica band called Munchausen by Proxy, which she’s quick to point out “isn’t mainstream” because lord forbid anyone for a second thinks that she’s following some sort of trend. She’s also got this whole YOLO approach to life, so she only does whatever she feels like doing in the moment. Yet she's somehow still able to support herself and pay all of her bills, even though no sane employer would consider a person who takes off on spontaneous trips to Nebraska on a whim’s notice.

Of course, in common Zooey Deschanel fashion, she does all of this with an ultra positive, almost starry-eyed demeanor that, we guess, is supposed to enchant the audience like it does Carl (Jim Carrey). Unfortunately, it just makes us hate her. 

Perhaps the creepiest of the characters on this list is Ricky (Wes Bentley), but don’t let his obsessive tendencies distract you; Homeboy is totally a hipster. There's barely a moment in American Beauty when a video camera isn’t attached to his hand. Ricky takes to filming everything around him for the sake of art, even a plastic bag floating through the wind for a good 15 minutes. And the cherry on top? He calls the captured footage “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed.” That’s right, this is a guy who filmed a plastic bag for 15 minutes instead of recycling the bag like a decent human being.

And if that’s not enough to convince you of his hipster pedigree, Ricky hates Angela (Mena Suvari) because she’s a pretty cheerleader who he believes to be shallow despite barely knowing her. Once again, pretentious for wrong reasons. You can bet he’d change his opinion of her instantly if he found out she listened to Belle & Sebastian.

This may be an unpopular opinion, especially if you look at most of the critical acclaim Juno procured when it was released in 2007. Sure, the dialogue was snappy, there was a great cast, and the plot didn't belittle its audience's intelligence. Juno was a refreshing switch-up in theaters full of popcorn blockbusters with wooden, empty storylines and one too many explosions. But, for the sake of character study, let’s look past all that and focus on the film's main character, Juno MacGruff (Ellen Page).

She's a 16-year-old gal living in suburban Minnesota who, like your average hipster, listens to alternative music and favors things merely for their ironic value; for example, she has an hamburger telephone. After she has sex with her best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), she discovers that she's pregnant. Because of her age, Juno decides to give the baby up to seemingly picturesque couple Vanessa and Mark Loring (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), but she ends up developing feelings for the husband for seemingly no other reason than that he's longing for the glory days of his twenties, and he shares her taste in music and movies.

Though she gets angry when Mark later tells her that he's leaving his wife because he's unhappy, there's no denying it: While bonding over old Velvet Underground albums, Juno felt something for him. It's easy to chock this up to the fact that Juno is just foolish because of her youth, but that doesn't make her choices any less irritating to the viewer. Developing romantic feelings because of shared interests in the same music seems to be the common denominator with most of the hipster-types in films.

Also, that hamburger phone is just obnoxious.

Don’t get us wrong; We think High Fidelityis both a great book and an even better film. But that doesn’t mean that Rob Gordon (John Cusack)—or Rob Fleming in author Nick Hornby's 1995 novel—isn’t a pretentious, annoying asshole.

The credentials speak for themselves. Rob's day job finds him working in a record store and he has a penchant for saying things like, “What came first? The music or the misery?” And, “Books, records, films—these things matter. Call me shallow, it’s the fucking truth." Also, he makes mixtapes! He is, if you will, perhaps what one might call a proto-hipster.

But get this. The icing on the top of Rob's undoubtedly vegan cake is that, though he freely and unabashedly judges people by their taste in music, movies, and books, he can’t seem to figure out for the life of him why his relationships with women always go so wrong. This, in turn, makes him even more of a depressed little prick. Rinse and repeat.