Toronto 2025 Review: MILE END KICKS, Kicking Down the Door of Self-Worthy, Romcom Style

To be a young woman who yearns for work and some form of success in a male-dominated industry, especially one in which you will achieve some public notoriety, is setting yourself up for a challenge of epic proportions. I wish I could say it's changed since I was young, but the world of the arts and criticism, when it comes to those whose voices matter in what is made, seen, and remembered, is still dominated by men. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep pushing.

Chandler Levack knows from this situation from experience, and puts her memories good and bad, and some imagination, into her second feature Mile End Kicks. Given how well she articulated the budding cinephile experience in her first feature I Like Movies, expectations were high. Luckily, Levack more than meets those expectations with a film that is something of a love letter to a city, but more a love letter to young women everywhere who make huge but understandable and sometimes forced errors.

Grace (Barbie Ferreira, Euphoria) is a twenty-something woman, and it seems the only woman, working for Merch, a NOW-type alt weekly in Toronto, as a music critic. Maybe she doesn't know all she should, but she's got writing skills, plenty of drive, and a love of music that goes beyond just rattling off trivia information. She successfully pitches writing a book on Alanis Morrisette's "Jagged Little Pill", and gets it into her head that the best place and time to write this book, would be over the summer months in Montréal. 

So she packs her bags, rents a room in Madeleine's (Juliette Gariépy, Red Rooms) Mile End 4 1/2, and sets herself to work. Or, at least she should; she soon finds herself waylaid by not one, but two members of local indie bank Bone Patrol; Archie (Devon Bostick, Okja), who is apparently celibate, and Chevy (Stanley Simons, The Iron Claw), who is, according to Madeleine, 'the worst guy in Montréal'. It seems that Grace is about to go through her 'bad boy' phase; or perhaps more accurately, 'the guy for whom you'll throw everything else over even though he is clearly a douchebag' phase.

Montréal has always been the cultural centre of the country; also one of the cheapest cities to live in in North America (until about five years ago), so this is the city at more or less the height of its creative output, allowing wannabe musicians, artists, writers, designers to earn a living and still have time to work on their craft. Once we're in this world with Grace, it becomes clear why a young person would want to live here, to be inspired, to meet other young people at the same level of energy, to get cheap housing and hot sex with attractive people while writing your first book.

Except that Grace has not really prepared herself as well as she should; she's not picking up on red flags, she's not standing up for herself, she's not paying attention to how much money she's spending, and she's slowly ignoring her responsibilities to others. Grace is at that very difficult stage in life where she has the writing chops to succeed, she has her own unique voice and at least one good adult in her life giving her both encouragement and constructive criticism to help her succeed. But those factors are trying to compete with a lifetime living in culture and society that tells her, tht her value is only what men give her. Even with Alanis' iconic album of female rage as inspiration, at least in the 2011 setting of the film, someone like Grace doesn't want to be angry; she wants to be listened to, and she's told that she has a find a man to do the listening; but, she has to give a little (read: a lot) first.

It's easy to laugh or be flummoxed by Grace's terrible choices; it's easy to say it's obvious how awful Chevy is, or how want to yell at her about how she's acting like a petulant child at times, mistreating the few good people in her life, sometimes acting like an overly-horny teenager at others, and wasting a publishing opportunity many would give their proverbial right arm for. But even if you project confidence, you can be scared inside; if you've  never been away from home before and your parents coddled you, you can be ignorant of how to take responsibility; if you've never been infatuated or in love before, you can get swept up in a way that yes, you will oblivious to every seemingly obvious sign that you should run away.

Levack proves once again that she has a unique and deft hand for comedy, with its two most important cinematic points: dialogue, and timing. This includes one of the most brilliantly-filmed awkward sex scenes ever put to film (and realistic enough that I could hear various hums of remembrance from the women in the audience around me), the description of why people move to Montréal and how Canadian artists find success, to one-liner jibes at anglophones who show up in La belle province without speaking more French than 'merci'. The supporting cast never let their characters be one-dimensional; even the douchebags have more going on that is hinted in the subtext, with everyone fighting their own hidden battles.

Ferreira is an absolute gem as Grace, nailing that combination of drive, desire, confident one minute and anxious the next. She knows she should trust in herself, but it seems there's a lesson to be learned first, one we all think we can avoid but seems to happen to us nonetheless, about finding the right people to be around, and how not to treat them, or yourself, like shit, and about how to stand up to those who are only in charge because we live in a patriarchy. 

With a vibrant palette, a terrific soundtrack, Mile End Kicks might lose a little bit of steam as it stretches out the ending, but it's a worthy entry to contemporary romcoms, one that acknowledges sex, queerness, money troubles, sexism, how any of us can get caught in the trap of not knowing our own worth, and learning to embrace our love, our anger, and our talent.

ScreenAnarchy is owned by XYZ Films, one of the producing partners of this film. This had no bearing on the review.