Chandler Levack’s Latest Will Make You Cringe (In The Best Way): Mile End Kicks Film Review
Mile End Kicks.
If ever there was a film made for REVERIE Magazine it is Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks, her second feature film following her Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF) 2022-award winning debut feature I Like Movies (Levack won the RBC Emerging Canadian Artist award). A film about a burgeoning music journalist? Check. Set during the 2011 Montreal music scene? Check. Plenty of references and jokes about artists who move from Edmonton to Montreal? Check. Original music written by Edmonton-to-Montreal transplants themselves TOPS? Check check check!
Mile End Kicks stars Barbie Ferreira (who is pulling up near the top of the Euphoria actors-in-movies contest) as Grace Pine, who begins the film working at a Toronto-based alt-weekly named Merge Weekly led by a music editor played by Jay Baruchel (in a brilliant piece of casting, almost like Baruchel is playing the grown-up version of his Steven Karp, from his breakout role in the Judd Apatow college comedy Undeclared from 2001). Ferreira’s Grace Pine decides to move to Montreal to begin to focus on working on a 33 ⅓ book about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, but ends up getting enveloped into the Montreal music scene, in particular a young band called Bone Patrol, featuring Devon “Rodrick Rules” Bostick, Isaiah Lehtinen (reuniting with Chandler Levack, after playing I Like Movies’ lead, Lawrence) and Stanley Simons (who last played Mike Von Erich in The Iron Claw) as the egotistical “the worst guy in Montreal” lead singer.
Mile End Kicks is directly inspired by Chandler Levack’s time as a music journalist during this same period in Montreal, so this is a film brimming with personal details and touches that could only come from someone who lived it. To go back to Jay Baruchel’s music editor character, he and the entire Merge Weekly writing staff is such a deeply relatable character type. I have met plenty of people like Baruchel’s The Hold Steady shirt-wearing Gen X/elder millennial magazine editor, or the magazine bullpen who are repeating cliche elder college rock bands at each other (“Gang of Four! Mission of Burma! Pere Ubu!”) in one of the funniest scenes in the film. They are the type of people who would scoff at Ferreira’s Grace Pine character writing a book expounding on Jagged Little Pill’s importance, as if it isn’t about Pavement or the Minute Men, it isn’t worth writing about. I love Pavement and the Minute Men as well, but the snobbishness/anti-pop-music worldview is so perfectly shown in the film, as the Merge Weekly staff is still stuck in 1994, while Grace Pine is living in the present day in 2011, excited about Joanna Newsom.
Mile End Kicks, like Chandler Levack’s I Like Movies, is so deeply real, and that includes having the lead character make mistakes. In the film, you will see her make bad decisions, you will exclaim to yourself “don’t do that Grace!!!” but she’s in her early twenties still figuring stuff out. When you were in your early twenties (or if you are in them right now), did you make the right decision, whether romantic or letting a friend down, all the time? Of course not. Grace Pine feels like a fully dimensional human being, which is a testament to both Levack’s incredible writing and Barbie Ferreira’s amazing performance.
Mile End Kicks is a film full of 2011 period touches that will bring you back to the time. Making Skype calls, the classic Gmail interface, platform wedge Toms, this film is 2011 in its very bones. It’s a film that is alternately laugh-out-loud funny, relatable, it will make you cringe (in the best way), while also being romantic. The film, produced by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller’s Zapruber Films production company (the same team behind Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie), will get a wide release in Canada sometime early next year via Elevation Pictures, but be ahead of the curve and check it out as part of CIFF!
Mile End Kicks has a second screening at the Calgary International Film Festival on September 28. Tickets are available at www.ciffcalgary.ca. Mile End Kicks will be heading to the Vancouver International Film Festival in October.