Dramedy captures 20-something angst, confusion

Canadian writer-director Chandler Levack is becoming an auteur of spiky, self-aware, semi-autobiographical nostalgia.

Her 2022 feature debut I Like Movies related the awkward coming-of-age story of a teenage video store clerk in Burlington, Ont., in 2003.

In this deliberately loose dramedy, which debuted at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Levack sets her wayback machine to the summer of 2011 in Montreal. Grace (Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira), a 24-year-old music critic, has just got off the bus, determined to do important work, have sex and possibly learn French.

Low rents on cool apartments in the neighbourhood of Mile End are drawing young artists, writers and musicians from all over Canada, Grace explains in an article she’s writing about the city’s indie music scene.

Everyone is hustling to make it in their creative fields — at least until “they run out of money and have to move to Toronto and get a real job,” as one character later adds in a melancholy bit of fact-checking.

Levack is recreating a very specific time and place. There are lots of crowded, sweaty loft parties where you get the feeling you’ve just missed a sighting of Arcade Fire or Grimes. There are lots of creative types subsisting on bagels, beer, cigarettes and MDMA.

But beyond nailing this particular setting, Levack is catching something more universal — that poignant, painful, beautiful 20-something moment when you have lunatic certainty about some things and woeful confusion about so many others.

Grace, for instance, is planning to write an entry for the popular 33 1/3 book series on iconic albums. Pitching her plan to dive into Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, she tells her New York-based editor that the singer-songwriter “is a Canadian icon.”

“Yeah, nobody cares about that,” her editor replies.

The editor is much more intrigued by Grace’s take on gender. “Society hates it when women talk about themselves,” Grace suggests. Citing the runaway resonance of Jagged Little Pill, Grace calls it “the first time in the culture a young woman has expressed how f—king angry she was, and it actually translated to millions of dollars.”

Still, because Levack likes self-deluded, slightly mixed-up characters, we see that while Grace may be hyper-aware of Morissette’s rage, she is constantly ignoring and tamping down her own.

There is her experience at a magazine with a horrible boss (BlackBerry’s Jay Baruchel, playing against type) who isn’t paying her. There are the bro-ish colleagues and critics who practically turn their backs on her while getting into intense debates about the influence of the Minutemen.

Then, when Grace ought to be writing her Morissette book, she’s instead caught up in a one-sided obsession with showy, self-absorbed Chevy (Stanley Simons of The Iron Claw), lead singer of a band called Bone Patrol. This is in spite of — or maybe because of — a warning from Grace’s worldly-wise roommate Madeleine (Juliette Gariépy of Red Rooms) that Chevy is “the worst guy in Montreal.”

Grace is also hanging out with Bone Patrol guitarist Archie (Devon Bostick from Diary of a Wimpy Kid), a nice guy with a secret issue that keeps him celibate. (He introduces himself to Grace by saying, “I also have social anxiety,” which actually seems like a pretty good 2011 pickup line.)

She ends up caught between two guys, which is the basic rom-com template that runs from Jane Austen to last year’s Materialists. Levack gives the trope a raggedy, rueful indie spin, though, complete with bad sex, cringey conversations and loads of millennial ennui.

Levack has a feel for emotional beats that are sweet but not sappy, and she catches the slightly aimless, messy, self-destructive vibe of Grace’s 24-year-old life. One sometimes wishes, though, that the script was just a bit tighter and clearer in terms of structure and motivation.

It’s hard to understand, for example, what Grace sees in the awful — and not even particularly charismatic — Chevy. Fortunately, Ferreira’s fresh, honest, relatable performance goes a long way to bringing us along as she stumbles toward some belated feminist epiphanies.

Grace might never finish that book on Alanis Morissette, but at least she’s going to make her voice heard, get paid what she’s worth and stop pretending she loves Infinite Jest just to impress boys.

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