‘The Idea of’ These Tattoos

The Anne Hathaway romantic comedy is otherwise pretty good.

Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine in The Idea of You. Photo: Screenshot.

I often have fantasies about being 40 years old, super hot, and divorced. Never in those fantasies am I dating a much younger man — I will cross the street if I see a group of teenagers heading in my direction, no offense — but according to The Idea of You, maybe I should. In the romantic comedy based on a book that was supposedly-based-on-Harry Styles-fan fic¹, Anne Hathaway plays Solène, a single mother who has just turned 40 and starts dating Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine²), a 24-year-old singer in a boy band. 

The romance begins inauspiciously: Solène accompanies her teenage daughter and her teenage daughter’s friends to Coachella. She mistakes Hayes’s private trailer’s bathroom as a gen-pop bathroom. They hit it off and start dating while Solène’s daughter is at camp. Solène’s Los Angeles art gallery does not really need minding over the summer, so she joins Hayes and his band on an international tour. I wish I could’ve known when I was 24 that the problem with my dating life is that I should’ve been dating famous 24-year-olds: they have bedframes (hotels) and real jobs (being in a boy band) and if their friends are annoying, at least they are annoying me on a PJ. 

But famous or not, they all have the same bad tattoos. Hayes’s tattoos are strange-bad, like distracting-bad, not “freshman community dick studying something in the arts at a private college” (one of those slutty little triangles³).