Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks is set in the summer of 2011, when a 22-year-old music journalist moves from Toronto to Montreal to be at the epicenter of an indie rock boom. I was also 22 in 2011, although I was merely dreaming of writing professionally about music. It would take me a couple more years, but even so, I can say with authority that this movie gets the look, feel and sounds of that time just right.
But I was, crucially, not a young woman writing about music, and Levack, who based Mile End Kicks on her own experiences, depicts an environment that’s hyper-literate, over-opinionated and dominated by know-it-all men.
Levack’s fictional avatar, Grace, works at a Toronto alt-weekly, where she’s the most earnest and passionate staffer. She’s not jaded yet. Her Gen X dude colleagues stand around and try to out-obscure each other with their musical tastes. Meanwhile, Grace wants to write about Alanis Morissette. Those guys would never admit to liking something so mainstream and, well, feminine.
Grace, played by Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira, is also sleeping with her older, married editor (Jay Baruchel), which she fruitlessly hoped would get her more serious assignments. So the second she gets a small advance for a book, she jumps on a bus and heads to Montreal.
What she finds there is a community of bohemians, performance artists, hipsters and rock ‘n’ roll wannabes. She’s an outsider amongst the outsiders: She doesn’t really smoke pot, she doesn’t speak French and she runs out of money almost instantly.
Distracting her from her book deadline is an up-and-coming band called Bone Patrol, whose dirtbag lead singer (Stanley Simons) cites Charles Manson’s “solo material” as a primary influence. As soon as he steps up to a mic, Grace falls for him, despite her roommate’s insistence that he’s the worst guy in Montreal. She doesn’t seem to notice that the band’s nicer, more sensitive guitar player (Devon Bostick) has been giving her doe eyes the whole time.
Because we have hindsight, we know that these musicians won’t be good boyfriends, that their bands won’t last long, and that Grace will certainly go on to better things, even though she makes decisions that are obviously, ruinously bad. Levack is clearly drawn to the inner workings of subcultures; her last feature, I Like Movies, was about misfits working at a video store in early 2000s suburban Toronto. This time she’s made her own version of Almost Famous (its poster is even hanging on Grace’s wall), Cameron Crowe’s dramatization of his time as a teenage rock critic in the ’70s.
Mile End Kicks is, like that film, also concerned with the social politics of music — which artists are considered serious and which aren’t, and who gets to make that call — but it’s looser, messier and makes you feel less ecstatic about the possibilities of art. But it knows its stuff. It’s a movie about being in the messy middle of something that feels monumental in the moment, about the years in your life when your music library is your entire personality, when you hear a new song and it’s the best thing you’ve ever heard and all you want to do is listen to it over and over and over again.
Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101,” Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2:00 on SPR News.