Lots of people enjoy Noah Baumbach’s work. But which Baumbach is that? The acerbic, autobiographical writer-director of The Squid and the Whale and Kicking and Screaming or the stylized humorist who wrote scripts for Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Fantastic Mr. Fox? And speaking of cartoon humour, is he really the same guy who scripted Madagascar 3?

“I like lots of different kinds of movies,” declares the versatile auteur, calling from New York City. “Of course, everything I set out to make is pretty compelling at the time, and I’m not really thinking about how it relates to what I’ve already done. They all present unique challenges, and it isn’t until after they’re completed that a longer conversation between them is revealed, to me or to other people.”

His latest effort, Mistress America, opens Friday (August 28), mere months after his hit While We’re Young, and together they create an intriguing portrait of an artist in mid-career. Baumbach wrote it with and for current muse Greta Gerwig, who also starred in 2012’s Francis Ha. Here, she plays Brooke Cardenas, an obnoxious charmer whose accomplishments are mostly in her own head—although they’re convincing enough to the young college student played by up-and-comer Lola Kirke.

“Brooke Cardenas is a character that Greta and I came up with for another story that, in the end, went nowhere,” Baumbach continues. “She seemed to take on a life of her own, and began to merit her own story. We were thinking about those people you meet at a time in your life when you’re still kind of unformed and have a big impact on you, but are kind of necessarily temporary.”

The youngsters in Mistress America are still finding their way through life, and that’s a familiar dynamic in his movies. Baumbach’s mother, Georgia Brown, was for years the main film critic for the Village Voice, and that gave him an inside view of cinema.

“All my work brings me back to what you might call the energy of childhood. Even if they are not cartoons, and not about children, or even for them, they somehow connect to that time in my life. I certainly remember the role movies played in our lives—hearing my parents talk about movies I was maybe too young to see. And as I got older, it was very important for me to be a kind of movie companion. We’d go to things that were more for me, and then I’d see movies that were more for adults—sometimes before I was ready,” he adds with a laugh. “At some point, I guess I started to internalize all that and began imagining what it was like to actually make them.”

If his newest film relates primarily to Gerwig’s more recent grappling with adulthood, While We’re Young can be seen as a kind of male-midlife-crisis sequel to 2010’s Greenberg, which explored the dark side of Ben Stiller as a still-youngish fellow angry about growing older.

“Ben’s Greenberg character is somehow trying to eliminate new experiences from his life,” the director explains. “But Josh, his character in While We’re Young, is more openhearted and ac­tively looking for change. First, he was like a 20-year-old trapped in a 40-year-old’s body, but in the newer film, he’s finding what’s left of his youth.”

Incidentally, Noah Baumbach will turn 46 this week.