Jason Blum, Baumbach's college roommate who was producing a film for the first time, obtained financing after receiving a letter from family acquaintance Steve Martin endorsing the script. Blum attached the letter to copies of the script he sent around Hollywood.[3]
Kicking and Screaming received mostly positive reviews, with many critical assessments describing it as remarkably competent for a directorial and writing debut, expecting that Baumbach would "graduate to better things."[4]
Roger Ebert praised the film's "good eye and a terrific ear; the dialogue by writer-director Noah Baumbach is not simply accurate... but a distillation of reality–elevating aimless brainy small-talk into a statement."[5] Reviews often mentioned the thin and meandering plot, but most noted this as a facet of the characters' life stage. Janet MaslinofThe New York Times stated, "Kicking and Screaming occupies its postage-stamp size terrain with confident comic style."[6]
According to Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, "You begin to wonder why you're bothering to watch the aimless lives of these four unfold... At 25 he may be too close to the material to achieve the detachment from which irony and meaning flow."[7] In a 2020 retrospective article, Nathan Dunne of The Guardian wrote the film is "a charming distillation of 90s slacker posturing and the tedium of a quarter-life crisis."[8]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 57% based on 37 reviews, with an average rating of 5.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Witty and watchable yet undeniably flawed, Kicking and Screaming marks writer-director Noah Baumbach as an emerging talent with intriguing potential."[11]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 75 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[12]
