MILE END KICKS - Film Review

Mile End Kicks settles into a very specific perspective, and once you recognize whose perspective it is, the film starts to open up in a much more interesting way. Chandler Levack isn’t approaching this world from a distance or trying to decode it like an outsider. She was part of that ecosystem, working as a music critic in the 2000s and early 2010s, embedded in that alt-weekly circuit where bands, venues, writing, and identity all blur together. That lived experience is the film’s backbone. The conversations feel right because they are remembered rather than constructed, and there’s a looseness to the dialogue that comes from familiarity rather than design. People talk in circles, overestimate their own insight, drift between sincerity and performance, and that rhythm never feels forced.

You can trace that same sensibility back to I Like Movies, which for me was one of the strongest films of 2022. Levack took a very specific character and let his blind spots sit fully in the frame without cushioning them. That film has a clarity in how it handles perspective, a willingness to let the protagonist be limited without trying to soften or justify it. Mile End Kicks operates similarly in terms of specificity, but it stays much closer to its central point of view, and that closeness becomes both the film’s strength and its constraint.

Grace Pine, played by Barbie Ferreira, is the entry point into that world, and the film rarely leaves her orbit. She arrives in Montreal with a clear intention, to write a book on Alanis Morissette, but that purpose dissolves almost immediately into something looser and more ambiguous. What replaces it is not exactly failure, but a kind of absorption into the environment. She settles into Mile End and begins to treat it as a complete system, a place where identity can be reshaped without friction. Ferreira plays this with restraint, which is what makes it effective.

There is no exaggerated arrogance or overt hostility, just a quiet assumption that the city will accommodate her. She does not meaningfully engage with the French language, does not push beyond the social and cultural boundaries that are immediately comfortable, and instead moves through a version of Montreal that reflects her back to herself. That portrayal feels precise, and it avoids turning her into a caricature, but the film also chooses not to interrogate that perspective in a sustained way.

Within that contained space, the film is often at its best. The humour emerges naturally from behaviour rather than structure, and the tone is built on small social frictions rather than overt conflict. The anglo-franco dynamic is one of the most convincing elements because it is never framed as a central issue, yet it informs nearly every interaction. Anglophone characters move through the city with a kind of habitual detachment from French, not as an explicit rejection but as an ingrained indifference, while Québécois characters carry a quieter, more internalized frustration that never needs to be verbalized. That tension gives the film a layer of authenticity that does not rely on exposition.

The relationships around Grace add texture without pulling the film away from its core perspective. Devon Bostick’s Archie provides a grounded counterpoint, someone who feels embedded in the city rather than passing through it, and that distinction stabilizes the narrative whenever it risks drifting too far into abstraction. Stanley Simons’s Chevy captures a very recognizable social type, the Mile End and Plateau softboy whose language gestures toward depth without fully arriving there. The performance balances exaggeration and accuracy in a way that makes it both funny and slightly uncomfortable, because it reflects a pattern that is easy to recognize.

The dynamic between Juliette Gariépy and Robert Naylor as Madeleine and Hugo introduces a different register altogether. Their relationship is volatile, cyclical, and unresolved, and it feels less curated than the rest of the film’s interactions. There is a sense that their connection exists outside the aestheticized version of Mile End that Grace inhabits, and that contrast gives their scenes a rawness that stands out. They do not appear to be constructing an identity in the same way, which makes their presence feel more immediate and less performative.

Even the smaller narrative threads contribute to this layered feeling. The relationship between Grace and Jeff, played by Jay Baruchel, is only partially explored, but it carries weight. There is a clear imbalance of power in that dynamic, rooted in their professional history, and it helps contextualize Grace’s move to Montreal as more than just a spontaneous decision. The film does not expand on it extensively, but it lingers enough to shape how her actions are understood.

Where the film begins to feel constrained is in how consistently it remains within this limited field of vision. The focus on Mile End is deliberate, and as a study of a specific social environment, it is effective. However, the film rarely steps back to examine the limitations of that environment or the perspective that defines it. When it does move beyond Mile End, the shift is noticeable. The glimpses of the broader city, its landmarks and wider geography, are presented in a way that feels more polished and less textured, almost as if they belong to a different film. These moments can come across as slightly kitschy, not because they are inaccurate, but because they lack the lived-in quality that defines the rest of the work.

This imbalance becomes more significant when considering what is absent. Montreal is a city shaped by a wide range of cultural influences, languages, and communities, and that complexity is only faintly visible here. The lack of meaningful representation of people of colour, in particular, stands out in a way that shifts the film from feeling intentionally focused to feeling inadvertently narrow. At that point, the distinction between intimacy and limitation becomes harder to ignore.

The temporal framing of the film also contributes to this tension. By situating itself in 2011, it gestures toward a moment that is often remembered as culturally vibrant, yet it does not fully engage with the structural changes already underway at that time. Gentrification in Mile End was becoming increasingly visible, and while the film captures the aesthetic surface of that era, it does not explore the underlying transformation in a substantive way. The result is a portrayal that feels accurate in its details but somewhat incomplete in its context.

Despite these limitations, there is a consistency of vision that makes the film compelling. Levack’s decision to remain close to her material creates a sense of cohesion that is difficult to replicate through observation alone. Small details, such as the nod to Ritz PDB, function less as references and more as fragments of memory embedded within the film. They ground the narrative in a recognizable reality, even as they invite the viewer to compare that reality with their own experiences. The same can be said for the mental leap to places like Orange Julep, which sit outside the film’s immediate scope but highlight the broader range of what Montreal contains. That contrast reinforces the sense that the film is capturing one version of the city rather than attempting to encompass it entirely.

In the end, Mile End Kicks ends up feeling smaller than it wants to be, and more forgiving of Grace than it probably should be. It captures her drift, her blind spots, her avoidance, but it never really presses on them hard enough to turn that into something sharper. Because of that, the film feels less critical than it could have been, and that lack of friction makes its perspective feel more limited than intended. It still works in how precisely it captures a certain environment and the people within it, but it holds back from fully interrogating that world, leaving something on the table that you can’t quite ignore.