She eventually meets and befriends a fellow student, Tony, and develops a crush on him, but when he begins dating another girl, Nicolette, she feels alone again.

However, upon returning home one night, Brooke finds herself locked out of her apartment and discovers that her boyfriend has withdrawn financial support.

Upset, Tracy, sitting outside the house, takes a hit on the bong that Tony had earlier fashioned from an apple with her initial emblazoned on it, smoking marijuana from Dylan's freezer.

Still finding herself unable to fit in, she decides to start her own literary club, inviting both Tony and Nicolette to apply for membership.

[3] The film's musical score was composed by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, who had previously collaborated with Baumbach on The Squid and the Whale.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Mistress America brings out the best in collaborators Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, distilling its star's charm and director's dark wit into a ferociously funny co-written story.

[12]Variety's review from Sundance read "Greta Gerwig shines in a tailor-made role in her and Noah Baumbach's spirited screwball follow-up to Frances Ha.

While conceding that the film's ending "resolves things on a basically satisfying, quasi-poignant note," Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the "inconsistency of the approach overall, combined with Gerwig's maximum voltage performance, is disconcerting, even off-putting".

[14] Amy Nicholson, writing for LA Weekly, praised the casting of the section, and in particular the performance of Heather Lind, but found that the "clumsy" sequence "stops the movie cold".