TIFF ‘25 | I Cried 45 Seconds Into This Movie
General Reviews
I’ve always pointed to Almost Famous as the movie that first made me fall in love with movies. It was the first time I felt seen, felt inspired, felt like a bolt of lightning struck through me while sitting cross-legged in front of a box TV. As I’ve gotten older, that connection started to fade and I eventually stopped calling it my favourite. Maybe I outgrew the wonderment, or maybe the mythology of 70s American rock ‘n’ roll just started to feel too distant from anything resembling my own life.
When I read the TIFF program description of writer/director Chandler Levack's, Mile End Kicks, “With shades of Almost Famous, but set in 2011 Montreal, and instead offers a feminine point of view,” I felt that it was tailor made for me.
I first encountered Levack through her debut feature I Like Movies in 2021 where I left the theatre with that bitter resentment feeling of, ‘Fuck, I wish I wrote this movie.” After learning more about Levack and her backstory into becoming a working writer and director, I designated her my Career Goals Blueprint. She was a film student turned film critic turned filmmaker. I’m ⅔ of the way there!
All of the above is a long-winded way of saying, I was highly anticipating Mile End Kicks.
The movie opens with Grace (Barbie Ferreira) scribbling bullet points into a tiny notepad at an indie concert. “I’m a music critic,” she told an onlooker. Sitting there in the theatre with my own tiny notepad, scribbling down bullet points on this movie, I felt instantly called out. Cut to interior Grace’s childhood bedroom and we see a collection of her things featuring Sonic Youth CDs and an Almost Famous poster tacked to the wall.
So, yeah, at that moment, barely a minute into the movie, I started to cry. It had absolutely nothing to do with the 4 glasses of wine I had consumed up to that point. It was because I felt deeply, molecularly, seen.
Throughout the movie, I kept laughing in disbelief at seeing the literal time and space I grew up in depicted on screen in such a large scale. As Grace spends the summer in Montreal writing a book about Alanis Morissette’s ‘Jagged Little Pill,’ she finds herself in a world that looked, sounded, and dressed a lot like my own past.
When Grace interviews Chevy (Stanley Simon) the frontman of the underground band Bone Patrol, he names Big Shiny Tunes 1 through 5 as their biggest influences. On her first night out in MTL, she enters a club as Peaches’ ‘F*** the Pain Away’ blasts from the speakers. She wears almost exclusively American Apparel jersey dresses and disco shorts. If you know, you know.
What felt most important to me, though, is how Levack portrays real girlhood in this era. Grace is messy, oftentimes unlikeable even. She flakes on friends and sabotages good opportunities to date shitty guys, like Chevy, who treat her terribly and say to her “My dick just doesn't get hard to you." Barbie Ferreira captures that whole being young and broke in the indie sleaze years all without apology, while Devon Bostick as Archie (p.s. Rodrick Rules) shines as the rare wholesome band member who actually sees and respects her, even though he's celibate. Levack makes space for this contradiction: the ache of wanting to be cool and loved versus the bigger, sharper truth Grace eventually voices—she doesn’t really want to date the boy in the band, she wants to be the boy in the band.
Despite the hyper-specific nostalgia, despite how niche-ly relatable Mile End Kicks will be for Canadian millennials, the film has the heart and hilarity to resonate far beyond its setting. I think it has the potential to become a staple in the post-grad coming-of-age genre that is comfortably home to movies like Frances Ha, The Worst Person in the World, and Reality Bites.
By the end, I certainly saw the shades of Almost Famous. They both follow a music journalist and they both have Jay Baruchel. But, for me, this movie captures a more prescient and relatable feeling. Plus it is coming out at just the right time and right place for me. (It was made for me, after all). Where Almost Famous made me fall in love with movies, Mile End Kicks reminded me why.
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