Chandler Levack’s film consciously mirrors the rhythms of uncertainty—that eternal "where am I headed?"—of its 22-year-old protagonist.
Grace (Barbie Ferreira), the heroine of *Mile End Kicks*, is a 22-year-old Toronto-based music critic who writes for an indie rock magazine called *Merge Weekly*; there, the staff consists of a group of male nerds who gather around their cubicles to engage in heated debates over whether Hüsker Dü’s masterpiece is *Zen Arcade* or *Flip Your Wig*. The year is 2011, and Grace has published 400 articles in *Merge* over the past year. As far as job opportunities for a 22-year-old music critic go, that figure isn't bad at all.
Director: Chandler Levack
Writer: Chandler Levack
Stars: Barbie Ferreira, Jay Baruchel, Devon Bostick
Moreover, Grace is an incisive writer. At the beginning of the film, we see her pitching an idea for the *33 1/3* book series—a collection of essays and meditations centered on individual albums; she wants to write a volume on Alanis Morissette’s *Jagged Little Pill*, a record she has perfectly pegged: ("I really feel like that was the first time in culture that a young woman expressed how fucking angry she was, and that it actually translated into millions of dollars"). She lands the contract and decides to spend the summer writing her book in Montreal, a city the film portrays as the French-Canadian answer to 1990s Seattle: a place teeming with clubs, loft parties, and indie rock hipsters surviving on a diet of "bagels and cigarettes."
Had Grace simply gone to Montreal and written her book, there wouldn't have been much of a movie to tell. Instead, she falters and wanders aimlessly. And so does *Mile End Kicks*. It is worth noting that there are worse things a film centered on a writer could do. *Mile End Kicks* aims to capture the chaotic freedom of a young woman embarking on an adventure on her own, far from her usual environment for the very first time. To that end, screenwriter and director Chandler Levack establishes a pleasantly breezy tone, tinged with a hedonistic spirit of adventure that often—and intentionally—borders on the *cringe*.
Grace rents a room on Craigslist, and her roommates turn out to be a sexy French-Canadian couple—Madeleine (Juliette Gariépy), a DJ, and Hugo (Robert Naylor), a drummer—who introduce her to the local music scene. On her first night there, she attends a performance by Hugo’s band, Bone Patrol, whose sound calls to mind Pavement mixed with a cement mixer. Sporting her own unique brand of sexiness—a blend of studious, slightly nerdy Catholic girl gone wild—she flirts with two of the band members: the guitarist, Archie (Devon Bostick)—a smart, weed-smoking charmer so polite that he lives a celibate life (due to suffering from oral herpes)—and Chevy (Stanley Simons), the lead singer, who is described as "the worst guy in Montreal." Nothing we see in the film contradicts that description. He is an eccentric megalomaniac living in his own little world, who sings a song titled "Korean Supermarket" and swaggers across the stage as if he fancies himself the post-grunge answer to Jim Morrison.
I have a soft spot for coming-of-age comedies that meander in a realistic way (one of the best examples of this genre is *The Perks of Being a Wallflower*). The problem with *Mile End Kicks* is that the film tends to be, simultaneously, too listless and overly cartoonish. Chevy is such a selfish oddball that he seems like an alien, and Archie embodies—all too obviously—the archetype of the "adorable, sensitive grunge guy" who waits patiently for his chance in the background. As for Grace, Barbie Ferreira—who plays a similarly sensitive misfit in the recent *Faces of Death*—isn't given enough dialogue to allow the character to truly demonstrate her intelligence, beyond the snippets we hear from her rock criticism.
Grace’s dilemma, as framed by the film, is that she finds herself caught in the "cool girl" trap: she bends over backward to please the men around her—such as Jeff (Jay Baruchel), her editor at Merge—with whom, it is revealed, she maintains a sporadic and emotionally distant relationship. (He summons her to "meetings" where they have sex in his office.) Yet even a young woman grappling with the patriarchal dilemma of "cool girl syndrome"—the desire to be independent while simultaneously being accepted—could display a sharper edge than Grace does.
Grace’s life begins to crack and crumble—which is, of course, part of the adventure of being young and irresponsible. However, I wasn't entirely convinced by the way this unfolds.
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