C’mon C’mon (2021)
dir. Mike Mills
Rated: R
image: ©2021 A24
If you’re looking for something, anything, to lift your spirits out of the sewer that is our current moment and forget for 108 precious minutes that there is a raging plague all around us, look no further than the best film of 2021, Mike Mills’s newest effort, C’mon C’mon.
But don’t misunderstand me in thinking the movie is all rainbows and puppy dogs. Here you will experience sadness – in the form of a pulsing melancholy that Mills has mastered – frustration, and even, in moments, hopelessness. The messiness of human existence ensures that the bad must come with the good. That good, though, the transcendent wonder that sometimes briefly reveals itself as part of being a human on planet Earth, is achingly beautiful. Mills captures it in a most sublime way in C’mon C’mon.
This is Mills’s fourth feature, after his 2005 indie effort Thumbsucker, the deeply personal Beginners, and the poignant 20th Century Women, which would have been at the top of my best films of 2016 had I seen it before putting that list together. Mills is becoming, before our eyes, the preeminent visual artist of exploring human connection. I’ve walked away from his latter three films feeling that I understand the human condition a little bit better.
C’mon C’mon tells the story of Johnny. He’s an NPR-style radio journalist whose current assignment is interviewing kids and preteens all around the country. He wants to know about their thoughts on the future of the planet, their hopes and dreams for their own future, and the complexities of navigating their present moment.
Johnny’s life is disrupted after a phone call with his sister, Viv. Her estranged husband, Paul, who has moved out of their home in L.A. and taken a new job in Oakland, struggles with mental illness. The stress of uprooting his life for a new job in a new city has caused deterioration in his fragile mental state. The film doesn’t go into great detail about Paul’s diagnosis, but in the few brief scenes in which we see him, it’s clear he struggles with anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and perhaps bipolar disorder.
Viv needs Johnny’s help to look after her nine-year-old son, Jessie, while she travels to Oakland to convince Paul to check himself into a clinic so he can get the help he needs. What Johnny thinks will be a weekend away from his home in New York City turns into an open-ended arrangement and a cross-country trip with Jessie when it becomes clear Viv needs to spend more time with Paul than she initially expected.
One mark against C’mon C’mon is that, while it does indict the precarity that capitalism inflicts upon people in these kinds of situations – you still need to bring in money to pay the bills, after all, no matter what’s going on in your personal life – these characters live in a sort of fantasy world compared to the lived experience of so many Americans.
Viv is a writer and college-level writing teacher who can seemingly put her life on pause as she helps Paul. While Johnny is forced to get back to his interview schedule, which is the impetus for taking Jessie back to NYC with him – the heart of the narrative – his situation is nothing like the millions of people who would immediately lose their jobs if they had no other option than to bring their kid to work.
That one quibble aside, the connection that Johnny makes with Jessie as he looks after his nephew is pure magic. I don’t have kids, have no plans to ever have any, so take my opinion with the proverbial grain of salt, but C’mon C’mon translates with raw realism the dizzying highs and crushing lows of being responsible for a helpless tiny human.
Jessie is precocious, inquisitive, and weird in the way that only kids are. (Viv explains to Johnny before she leaves that part of her and her son’s pre-bedtime ritual involves Jessie pretending that he’s an orphan who has come to stay the night with Viv. He tells her about his time at the orphanage, and he asks Viv questions about her own family and life.) Jessie is also stubborn, spoiled (an observation his uncle makes about him in the audio diary that he keeps for himself), and he can be a bit of a brat.
We’re all a bundle of our past traumas, though, and Johnny is no exception. Despite his perceptive and inquisitive nature, which makes him a good interviewer, Johnny is quiet by nature and doesn’t talk easily about his emotions. His last relationship ended in heartbreak when his girlfriend left him, an experience he’s reticent to talk about when Jessie asks.
I have to imagine that one of the greatest joys of parenting – or, in Johnny’s case, guardianship – is when your kid finds joy in the same things you do. But the elation Johnny feels when Jessie admits that he likes New York City better than L.A. quickly gives way to the stress and day-to-day tedium of non-stop child care.
Viv commiserates with her brother on the phone when she tells him that as much as she loves Jessie – so much so, she says, that it’s inexplicable even to herself – sometimes she wants nothing more than to get away from him and his constant talking, which makes her feel like a terrible person.
The movie also doesn’t shy away from the sheer terror that comes with parenting. Johnny briefly loses Jessie twice during the movie, once in a convenience store and once on a bustling New York City street. My use of the word briefly is ironic. While each panic-inducing instant lasts only a few minutes – in both cases, it’s because Johnny is distracted for a few precious seconds; something that happens, from what I understand, with unimaginable ease – it seems like an eternity to Johnny.
The movie makes us feel Johnny’s immediate and overwhelming dread when he can’t find Jessie. I can’t imagine how much that’s compounded when it’s not actually your child, but someone else’s, for whom you have been entrusted to care.
Mills adds extra layers to the characters in C’mon C’mon – Johnny’s failed relationship is one example – approximating the messiness of real life. Before Viv’s plea to Johnny for help, the siblings had been somewhat estranged themselves. They engaged in bitter fighting – which we see in heartbreaking flashbacks that Mills strips of any sound – due to their opposing views on how to care for their mother, who died a year ago after a debilitating battle with dementia.
Interspersed throughout the picture are the interviews Johnny has conducted with different kids. I can’t attest to it, but these sequences feel like interviews with regular kids, not actors performing for the movie. Their observations about themselves and America – one describes the latter as “bad, but beautiful” when reflecting on what everyday life is like here – paint a complex portrait of growing up in this moment. One kid says about the future that, “I imagine and hope it will be good.”
The phenomenal performances within C’mon C’mon add to its ethereal, if melancholic, aesthetic. Joaquin Phoenix gives a career best effort as Johnny. His shy, tender portrayal is the perfect antidote to the sour taste left in my mouth from his work in the nihilistic and emotionally deadening Joker. Phoenix is able to relate the pain and trauma that comes with existing on this planet while also leaving room for the wonder and hope that makes life worth living.
Eleven-year-old English actor Woody Norman gives a breakout performance as Jessie. The young actor’s impeccable American accent would be enough to commend Norman on its own – especially considering how terrible my own attempts, as a full-grown adult, are at doing the opposite; my British accent is atrocious. Norman is seemingly effortless in his portrayal of the precocious, adorable, and sometimes insufferable Jessie. That unkempt mop of hair makes the cute kid impossible not to love.
Rounding out the cast are solid supporting performances from Gaby Hoffmann – a former child actress herself, with memorable roles in Uncle Buck and Sleepless in Seattle – as Viv, and Scoot McNairy – shout out to a Dallas local! – as Paul. McNairy is excellent anytime he pops up in something. He seems destined to be that guy, though, who is great in every role, but who is only on screen for a total of fifteen minutes.
Robbie Ryan’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography adds a wistful, memory-like quality to the film. It makes more poignant the passage near the end of the movie in which Johnny laments that this life changing experience for him will be nothing but a few hazy memories for the nine-year-old Jessie.
Both Johnny and Jessie make huge strides in emotional growth during C’mon C’mon, which the movie suggests should be one of the primary goals for us all. Mike Mills has made another film that is at once heartwarming and melancholic, and showcases the terrible beauty of our short time as humans on Earth. If aliens came to us asking for a good example of what represents the human experience, C’mon C’mon would be an excellent choice with which to respond.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
As I’m getting older, I’m finding that a movie like C’mon C’mon is right in my wheelhouse. It’s emotionally affirming, intellectually stimulating, and has a strong authorial stamp. Not that I don’t love a dark, even disturbing, film sometimes, like Taxi Driver, but C’mon C’mon checks just about every box for me.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Mills and his sound designer include a neat audio trick by focusing the sound on what Johnny’s mic is picking up when Jessie is using it to record wild sound on an LA beach.
- Mills uses the perfect song to introduce us to Johnny’s NYC: The Ostrich by the band The Privatives, Lou Reed’s nascent attempt at forming a band that would essentially become The Velvet Underground.
- A parent’s lament: “I was tired, but he wasn’t.”
- Johnny’s fumbling as he tries to affirm a woman’s right to choose when Jessie asks about abortion is priceless.
- The “you’re crying” scene. If it doesn’t get a little dusty in the room when you watch it, you’re a monster.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
I watched this on an awards season screener disc in my home theater. C’mon C’mon is currently available for rent on most digital platforms, but at a premium $19.99 price point.