Alice-Heart optimistically envisions a world in which an aspiring writer’s dream of financial security through her art is still achievable — if unlikely. Combined with its black-and-white photography and consciously naturalistic dialogue, the film is a throwback to another era, a time (perhaps the last) when filmmakers could come together with a group of friends and make a movie that could launch a sustainable filmmaking career. It happened to a number of American filmmakers from an urban, intellectual milieu similar to the ones responsible for Alice-Heart; Greta Gerwig is one of those filmmakers, the closest of whose films Alice-Heart resembles, Frances Ha, expresses a lot of the same anxieties about a young woman’s personal independence and artistic identity.
If there is one question driving Alice-Heart, both the film itself and it’s titular character, it is: How do you know when you’ve lived enough life that it’s worth writing about? In this question the film recalls a more recent film about the role of lived experience as fuel for creativity, Christian Petzold’s Afire. The answer here, however, if there is one, is packaged within a familiar coming-of-age story. College senior and aspiring writer Alice-Heart (Lissa Carandang-Sweeney) dreams of entering the real world as soon as possible, though her eagerness bites her in the ass when, in the film’s opening scene, she calls her unreasonably grouchy young professor (among his demands: no computers, everything handwritten, preferably in cursive) an asshole, and finds herself kicked out of the last class she needs both to graduate and for her mom to continue paying her rent.
As in most coming-of-age stories, Alice-Heart’s personal misfortunes foreground her personal shortcomings, and the film is at its best when it surrounds her with supporting characters whose heightened qualities throw her foibles into sharp relief. Besides her grouchy professor (Gabriel Elmore), Alice-Heart’s wealthy classmate, Joan (Kelsey O’Keefe), is gratingly bubbly and sociable, and her ex-boyfriend (Adam McAlonie) is an idiot with a cruel streak. The most grounded supporting character in the film is Tony (Tony McCall), her new photographer neighbor who, despite his confident, creative output, is also figuring out his own life.
Not to be outdone by financial or academic woes, Alice-Heart’s relationship with her boyfriend takes an immediate nosedive when he admits to being in love with a girl he met in Rome the previous semester. Unable to pay rent and emotionally floundering amidst the realization that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, what she wants, or how to be alone, Alice-Heart accepts Tony’s offer and moves into his spare room.
Though Alice-Heart now has two potential romantic partners to contend with (she briefly, but unsuccessfully, reunites with her ex), mercifully the film is not actually about which boy she will choose to be with, but about what version of independence she will choose for herself. Where Tony may have hang-ups about a past relationship, he at least embodies confidence in one’s creative output, which we come to understand is fueled by having lived through a few things worth grappling with. Alice-Heart’s creative confidence comes after dealing with the repercussions of her actions, the most important of which involves Joan and the mean professor. The result, importantly, is that while the seemingly one-dimensional supporting characters have changed, it’s only because Alice-Heart’s sharp, if occasionally misguided, judgment of them has softened, allowing their impression on us to deepen.
If there is something missing from Alice-Heart it’s that it doesn’t pay all that much attention to the act of writing. Because the act of living is given pride of place in the hierarchy of creative output, there is little detail to be gleaned here about the labor involved, and thus a conspicuous gap of thematic development. A brief, subway-set sequence at the beginning, showing a glimpse of the personal writing Alice-Heart hopes will help her break into the industry (though, based on the first sentence and a half, we see she has a lot of work to do), is mirrored by one other at the end, but that is all we see of Alice-Heart at work. Her professor (post-reconciliation) describes her final thesis as well-defined, with flawed characters and a detailed sense of place — all things that effectively describe the film. Though having to take this assessment of Alice-Heart’s writing for granted, the impression the film makes is that the act of living on its own is enough to fuel the creative process. For a film as charming, thoughtful, and ably performed as this, it’s a little bit of a shame we don’t come to know Alice-Heart’s life through her own words.
Published as part of Slamdance Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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