Barbie Ferreira in Mile End Kicks.HO/The Canadian Press
Mile End Kicks
Written and directed by Chandler Levack
Starring Barbie Ferreira, Devon Bostick and Jay Baruchel
Classification 14A; 111 minutes
Opens in theatres April 17
Critic’s Pick
A uniquely aggressive messiness permeates across our 20s: a series of rash dating decisions, spending our adult money on questionable purchases, many sartorial misadventures – the list only grows with hindsight. A misguided certainty in oneself sits atop that messiness, whether given to us haphazardly by our parents or even our teachers.
With the world laid at our feet, every twentysomething, consciously or not, allows themselves to believe that we can deliver on the boundless potential ahead in a way only few before us have done. This is at least true for Grace Pine in Mile End Kicks.
Played by Barbie Ferreira of Euphoria fame, Grace leaves the comfort of the Toronto suburbs for Montreal’s burgeoning indie music scene. Mark Twain once described Montreal as “the city of a hundred steeples,” but in 2011, Catholicism gave way to the houses of Grimes, Arcade Fire and Mac DeMarco. For Grace, and presumably any twentysomething Canadian music critic in the 2010s, Montreal was the perfect landing spot to write a 33 1/3 book about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, learn French, walk to the top of Mount Royal, have sex and fall in love (in that order).
Coming off the success of 2022’s I Like Movies, in which writer-director Chandler Levack opted for a gender-swapped avatar of herself, casting Isaiah Lehtinen (who also appears in Mile End Kicks in a supporting role) as an insufferable 17-year-old cinephile, the Toronto-born Levack once again mines her experiences for our viewing pleasure.
This time around, though, not only does Levack cast an actress as the character loosely based on herself, she casts an actress who bears a remarkable resemblance. It’s a decision that suggests a degree of confidence that perhaps Levack didn’t have with her directorial debut, where she granted herself some distance between her real life and a Tarantino-loving film bro; a confidence that’s found throughout this new film.
Aided by an engrossing performance from Ferreira that punctuates every awkward interaction and terrible decision with aplomb, Levack encapsulates the pain and joy of our first steps into adulthood with an assured and humorous hand – few filmmakers can make mouth herpes as comedic or endearing as she has.
The most striking aspect of Mile End Kicks comes from Levack’s balancing act between artifice and substance. Arguably, the chaos of our 20s is born from an insecurity that leads us to act in a way that emulates an idealized version of ourselves, rather than the unfinished article we are.
When Grace sits in her cubicle listening to an advance copy of Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me after having ill-advised sex with her boss in his office, she quickly types onto a blank Word doc: “Strings so beautiful it emulsifies your organs.” Just like Alanis would have written.
Grace breaks down in tears – maybe this is how she thinks a real appreciator of the arts would respond to Newsom’s organ emulsifying strings, or maybe being that chill, cool girl in the office who’s always down for a good time isn’t as cracked up as our favourite ‘90s movies told us it would be.
Stanley Simons and Ferreira in Mile End Kicks.Elevation Pictures/Supplied
Levack frames Grace in as unkind a light as possible. Her self-esteem is non-existent, she’s a horrible friend, an even worse housemate, her decision making solely comes down to which result will give her the approval of a guy the fastest; if she existed today, the youth would absolutely label her a “pick me.” But Levack eventually lends Grace some clarity in a touching monologue that will speak to every woman who ever clumsily stood outside that semi-circle of men in the office talking about music, movies, sports, art, restaurants, and lawncare equipment with the expertise of a sommelier.
By interjecting the movie’s present-day messiness with these moments of hindsight, Levack speaks to her younger self, affording that young woman some grace to make mistakes and offering her some understanding as to why she made them. In doing so, Levack encourages all of us to do the same.
Rather than attempting to exorcise our most cringe-inducing episodes from record, view them as the farcically surreal occasions they were. Rather than beating ourselves up over that humiliating one-night stand, gain some clear-eyed awareness as to why we ever wanted to bed a guy who won’t take his jeans off to sleep.
Mile End Kicks isn’t a cautionary tale to Gens Z and Alpha, it’s an open invitation to join the rest of us in our misdeeds and missteps with a note to give yourself some compassion along the way.
Society may hate when women talk about themselves, but at least we have filmmakers such as Levack who reject that phallic-coded notion and create unapologetic films with flawed characters doing their best. Hopefully we get a thirtysomething retrospective to close out this trilogy soon, before the Perimenopause Saga begins.
Special to The Globe and Mail