In pitching her book about Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill, Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira) is asked by her publisher why she is the person to write it -what insight does she specifically have, and what can she distinctly bring to the subject? Presumably the album means a lot to her -Grace says as much when she first brings up the idea. So she should share how it has impacted and informed her life as evidence of its lasting legacy. Grace takes this all in …and then it never manifests anywhere afterwards. It might as well be any album she is writing about.
Director Chandler Levack apparently based a lot of this movie, Mile End Kicks, on her own personal experiences -so perhaps on this note she didn’t actually learn much from it. Maybe that is harsh, the Morrissette piece is not the vital part of the story -it is the catalyst. But it is an awfully specific one, and is given an undue degree of attention through a handful of sequences of the movie -and yet Grace’s relationship to it remains uninterrogated. Why is Jagged Little Pill so important to her? It’s one of the best albums of all time -she’s not alone in her admiration. Maybe, like in several other facets of life, there is an unconscious lack of honesty in this pursuit. Could it just be a means to some nebulous end?
But there is something appropriate to the messiness in this thread's relationship to the others -it is a movie about a very messy period in the life of a very messy person. If Levack is indeed pulling from her own biography, she can be commended for not avoiding the difficult, complicated, or off-putting aspects of her avatar -here played by Barbie Ferreira. Grace is a critic and writer for a Toronto-based online music magazine in 2011 when she starts developing her Morrissette book and makes the decision to immerse herself in it by moving to Montreal and away from the bro culture of her office -despite having no connections there and very little French. She is soon distracted from her work however and everything else when she takes an interest in a local band called Bone Patrol, and in particular two of its members: a volatile disaffected frontman Chevy (Stanley Simons) and a mellow, sardonic though friendly guitarist Archie (Devon Bostick).
While the basic premise is fairly routine, Levack's context is anything but. She does a fine job establishing both the world and habits of online publishing and the environment and mild culture shock of life in Quebec in contrast to English Canada. Particularly there are comparisons to Toronto, and the cooler less hectic vibe of Montreal that the movie does eventually acknowledge is largely bias from the folks who live there. She reins in the amount of French though -there are no social situations Grace finds herself in where she is actually confronted with the language she expresses openness in learning but never actually putting in any effort towards it. In a way, she actually is what her landlady’s boyfriend Hugo (Robert Naylor)-the drummer for Bone Patrol- identifies her as: an Anglophone colonizer with no real interest in acclimating to French-Canadian culture.
Grace is a frustrating character in general by design -she is a woman in a new city in her early twenties making a lot of typical, irrational mistakes. Her infatuation with Chevy and desperate pursuit of a romance with him is perhaps the most striking one. She is warned early about how awful he is and of the general shallowness of his character. In fairness she does gravitate towards the far more charming and likeable Archie initially, but he is unavailable for her carnal needs due to being celibate (for what we eventually learn is a very understandable reason). Still, Chevy is not a compatible alternative -a guy both possessive over Grace and disinterested by her. His shyness in his day job and bizarre sexual experiences with Grace suggest something psychologically fascinating with his character, but it remains unexplored next to his consistently obnoxious and careless behaviour.
In Grace's attraction to him in spite of this, Levack makes an emphatic point about Grace's poor judgement in spite of her intelligence and good sense in other respects -and that as her name suggests, she should be given some grace for it. Which is all fair, but it does go along with her other mistakes -striking a bigger chord for how they affect others. As hinted before, the book (and Morrissette's thematic role) becomes less and less a focus to the point Grace's career is put in jeopardy over it, and she falls severely behind on rent -taking the kindness of her landlady Madeleine (Juliette Gariépy) for granted. Seemingly concerned with Grace's likability amidst all this, Levack tries tying some of this behaviour to an abusive relationship she was in with her Toronto boss played by Jay Baruchel. But just as the character is intentionally messy, the writing of this material is quite messy too, Levack going back and forth with her insinuations on whether or not this is a valid excuse for her later behaviours. The nobility of what she is attempting -a coming-of-age story for someone in their twenties- is overwhelmed by her confused efforts to process her own authenticity.
Ferreira's performance is a stabilizing force at least -with the exceptions of a couple American pronunciation ticks, very believable in this role through all of its chaotic turns and horny digressions. She radiates Grace's complexity better than Levack does, a great service to her director. Bostick also stands out with his charming, lackadaisical nature that never precludes his ability to come off as earnest. And Simons certainly captures the right tenor of dimwit pretension for Chevy, as well as those hints towards are more fascinating psychology left to the viewer's imagination.
The film has a pleasant atmosphere, selling its image of the Montreal culture scene effectively -encompassing everything from spoken-word poetry readings on an abandoned lot to disorienting clubs where sex and drugs are happening in every obscure corner. It doesn't feel specific to Montreal, and every comment about the air and aesthetic quality there compared to places like Toronto or Edmonton can be chalked up to cherry-picking, it does radiate that sense of underground cool appealing to someone of Grace's sensibility, as well as Levack's and her target audience. For a movie set in the 2010s, it could at times be mistaken for the 90s with its garage band stylings. Levack is obviously indebted to that region of thematic nostalgia (her debut, I Like Movies, was set in a video rental store), and she carries over a sufficient degree of the naturalism native to Gen-X indie culture. It is there in the music scenes, the awkward as hell sex scenes, and critically the personal catharsis for Grace, which here involves some clumsy reckonings and a clumsier love triangle resolution that I am stunned Levack actually went with -inadvertently passing for sweet and romantic a beat that is highly uncomfortable.
There are several avenues that Mile End Kicks postures at exploring that might have made it a more cohesive film. But the combination of the Morrissette thread, the culture shock, the reckoning with workplace abuse, and of course the blind infatuation with a man who is a walking red flag don't gel into a kind of overarching theme that Levack seems to be going for. Even the musical element is underplayed after a while. Maybe it is largely based in truth, but that truth needs structure applied -at least for the kind of movie this is. Individual components such as Ferreira's performance are strong and the context is nicely unique and interesting. It’s disappointing that the movie is not.
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