We know pretty quickly that Grace (Barbie Ferreria) is done with Ontario. She flips off the Toronto skyline from her seat on the bus. She’s headed to Montréal for the summer. She’s twenty-something, she’s a music critic, and she’s ready to write a book, learn French, and have “actual” sex. We know all of this from the yellow, college-ruled lines of her 2011 notes app headlined “GOALS FOR SUMMER IN MTL”.
Mile End Kicks is an indie sleaze period piece. Set in 2011, Grace goes to parties in tights, miniskirts, and red wedge Toms. She’s broke but can (sorta) make her cheap rent with parental support, stashed cash, and the money she’s owed from a stint at an indie music mag. Because pure music criticism isn’t enough to live on, Grace also writes culture pieces, op-eds, and sex toy reviews. It’s all very much of the time. Writer-director Chandler Levack stylizes Grace’s life to look right out of peak 2014 Tumblr. In loft party scenes, characters are illuminated by the blinding spotlight of flash photography, like images from a Boiler Room set. A break for a cigarette is bathed in Valencia-IG filter yellow, all summer night warmth. Grace’s roommate is the beautiful Franco-Canadian Madeleine (played by Red Rooms’ Juliette Gariépy), who works as a “hot girl DJ” back when that actually meant something. Grace’s hopes for having “actual sex” are denied or accepted with the casual, artistic, sex positivity of the era. The sex sucks or the boys are cagey, but even the guy who Madeleine warns Grace is, “the worst man in Montreal” is not yet manosphere-and-podcast-pilled.
In a true womanhood canon event, the worst man in Montréal happens to be of the most interest to Grace. Chevy (Stanley Simons) — lead singer of the tragically-named indie band Bone Patrol — is cocky and obnoxious and callous. He claims his musical influences are people like Ariel Pink (evidenced by their shared taste in big-ass sunglasses) and Charles Manson. His only real values are that art should be hard and matters of the dick should be unserious. But if Grace showed him to me on a heavily-filtered Instagram, I would admit that I got it. His onstage persona is easy and gender fucky: loose-fitting old-timey nursing uniforms, trenchcoats with only y-fronts underneath, smeared red lipstick. His plush mouth and his choppy, run-through hair give an aura of Hedwig’s toxic paramour, Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt) in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, itself a cornerstone of alt life in this era. Simons plays Chevy as mostly mumbling and looking for someone better to talk to, so when his big eyes finally give Grace more than a millisecond of attention, we tip forward with her.
The experiences that Grace works through are painfully of her age. She is reaching the first time in her life where the world may actually, maybe, give you what you desire; hot guys in bands are open to talking to you, you have a little tiny bit of money, you go to parties that are actually fun. You can go to that city where all your idols are making art. You can get that indie book deal (to write about Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill, no less!) The feeling is heady and insane.
It’s also all, unfortunately, only the first step. Her book doesn’t get magically written. Her time spent tripping after and over Bone Patrol’s lead singer all summer doesn’t magically come back. Her other (probably better) sexual option is the cute guitarist for Bone Patrol named Archie (played by Devon Bostick, who originally perked up alt-girl attentions in 2010 as the mean grungy older brother Rodrick in The Diary Of a Wimpy Kid movies, if you know you know). But he both has a crush on Grace and refuses to fuck her for “personal reasons”. The emails she sends about a payment owed to her for four grand doesn’t get answered. The icky stuff she went through a year ago isn’t actually all healed up just because she asserts that it is. Ferreria plays Grace as a raw nerve, a hot mess, a horny girl, a competent writer, a socially-awkward newbie. She’s not too weird — she fits in fine with the alt crowd after a bit of social lubricant — but her big eyes give up a little too much and her lip wobbles with hurt tears more than a couple of times.
Levack lets what she loves fingerprint themselves all over her movies. Her feature debut, I Love Movies, follows high school senior Lawrence (played by Isaiah Leitmann, who plays newly-out-of-the-closet Bone Patrol bassist Jesse in Mile End Kicks) a kid who adores films, is antisocially confident in his belief that he can “make it”, but never actually does any of the work. In a way, Grace picks up where Lawrence left off (though Levack wrote Mile End Kicks before I Like Movies), but with only small improvements behaviorally. Both of Levack’s films present youthful flopping: selfishness, carelessness, opportunities squandered, time mismanaged. It’s painful to watch. You know these people, or you were these people, or you are these people.
But it’s not all terrible, either. Mile End Kicks also feels like summertime, beer breath, the relief of finding a friend in a new city, the headrush of an adult crush. The film ends on a note so satisfying and delicious that it gives me a restless leg and a wet-mouthed need to hook up. Life sucks and you fuck it up and it’s awesome, all at once. Let’s make love like how I daydreamed about it on Tumblr in 2011.
