The crowd at last evening’s screening of The Art of Getting By was more than getting on and along at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema packed viewing of the new coming-of-age tale. The film’s coterie of pretty young things, including Emma Roberts, Freddie Highmore, Sasha Spielberg, and Elizabeth Reaser, turned out for the screening, hosted by the Cinema Society, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Alice + Olivia. A glam gathering including Blythe Danner, Abigail Breslin, Dani Stahl, Jessica Capshaw, Shanae Grimes, Marina Rust Connor, Amy Fine Collins, Lauren Bush and Stacey Bendet Eisner rounded out the fashionable flock.

“I was homeschooled all of high school, so I was always just getting by,” said Roberts, resplendent in a beaded cream Temperley London confection as she paralleled herself to the film’s bright slacker, played by co-star Highmore. “I’m a really fast reader. That was my trick.”  Writer/director Gavin Wiesen’s labor of cinematic love started when he penned the script in 2006. Five years later, ”by the skin of our teeth we managed to get enough money made, and we breathed a collective sigh of relief,” Wiesen recalled. Art imitating life, non? After the credits rolled, the chic crowd ventured two blocks away to fete the film at the Thompson LES Hotel afterparty. The stylish set moseyed around the premises, slinking between a few lounge-y enclaves and the spacious veranda in the crisp spring-summer limbo weather, as a sushi chef assembled rolls amid the comfortable chaos by the bar.

While a stubbornly complicated love story between high school seniors was at the heart of the flick, the complex teen-parent relationships played an important supporting role. Ann Dexter-Jones had parenting tales galore to dispense as she ebulliently air-kissed her way through the masses at the party, solo after a bit of mother-daughter bonding with Charlotte Ronson during the screening beforehand. “I was ‘mummy dearest’: I thought children should go to bed before 7 p.m., and my five kids were only allowed to share half an hour of phone calls each day,” Dexter-Jones recounted, dishing on Charlotte’s rebellious year at age 15 – followed immediately by twin sis Samantha’s turn to pout at the not-so-sweet age of 16.  “I’m sure they hated every rule I ever made, but when Charlotte graduated from high school she turned to me and said, ‘I used to be so angry with you because you were so strict, but I want to thank you for the values you gave me.’” Terms of endearment indeed.

Meanwhile, Katherine McPhee, sharply ensembled in a white blazer, got a glimpse of her future home base while watching the sweet and subtle film rife with lingering vistas of the Hudson, the UWS and Central Park. “It was nice to see New York in the raw, in terms of the way it was shot, since I’m moving here in August,” McPhee explained. But the starlet, set to star in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming NBC series Smash, has already gotten a taste of the city’s just-deal-with-it moments of frustration. “I got into an interesting altercation with a taxi driver recently—he was running the meter for 10 to 15 minutes and he didn’t know where he was going, so I just refused to pay!” McPhee said proudly. Ride and dash cab journeys aren’t for the faint of heart—sounds like McPhee is a New Yorker in training. Whatever it takes to, well, get by!
ALEXANDRA ILYASHOV