“The working man is a sucker” — so reads the opening title card of Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature, Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) — but no one said anything about hustling. Rico (Juan Collado), the 19-year-old at the movie’s center, might not work straight, but he works hard. He spends a sweltering New York summer lugging a cooler down Orchard Beach hawking nutties, or nutcrackers, the ultra-sweet and legally dubious homemade hard drinks that have become a staple of the Bronx’s relentless July heat. He’s a natural: when you make a purchase from Rico, you feel less like you’ve bought some cold juice and liquor mixed in a stranger’s kitchen than you have an endless summer night. He is effervescent as he bounces between customers, and when he decides his shift is over, he might crack a nutty himself, hit a house party, or head home to bicker with his sister, Sally (Nathaly Navarro), and love on his mom, Andrea (Yohanna Florentino). Life for Rico overflows with the promise of being young, the threat of adulthood nothing more than a puff of smoke in the sea breeze.
That is, until Rico learns he got a 16-year-old named Destiny (Destiny Checo) pregnant. His mom rakes him over the coals, but family is family, and soon enough, they welcome Destiny into their home, where she sits on Rico’s bed like a caged bird, so bowled over by life’s curveball that she can barely speak or eat for the first few days in her new home. Getting an underage girl pregnant might send most into a tailspin, but for Rico, it’s just another spinning plate to keep in the air. He drinks deeply from life, from family; he trusts in youth’s providence and wields it like a pistol, even if he struggles to see when he’s shooting himself in the foot.
Vargas has described Mad Bills as “a piece of the Bronx, a love letter to New York City, and a celebration of Uptown/Dominican culture,” and his debut teems with the hot noise that floods a room through an open window on the Grand Concourse. The director cut his teeth shooting projects that live between the borders of narrative and documentary work, and Mad Bills pulses with the vérité sensibilities formed by filming real people in their real lives. Vargas’ cast comprises first-timers and actors who have so far flown under the radar, a fact that’s revealed not through amateur work — you’d be hard pressed to find more compelling performances among the other freshman-class films Mad Bills neighbors in press junkets and film fests — but in their proximity to the folks you might pass on your walk to catch the train to work. Mad Bills parallels the wide-eyed lifeblood that runs through the earlier work of John Cassavetes; cinematographer Rufai Ajala trades Cassavetes’ handheld camera for a series of calculated still shots, but Rico’s maddening propensity to charm his way into and through mistake after mistake would fit comfortably among Husbands’ overgrown knuckleheads.
Soon enough, Rico folds Destiny into his beachside nutty hustle, and the reservations that bound her inside the apartment unfurl to reveal a fully rendered girl from the city: someone who loves sugary cereal and misses her mom, who is quick to call Rico on his bullshit but looks dreamily toward the child they have on the way, who holds aspirations of going back to school and building a better life for her new family than what she’s known. The young love between Collado’s Rico and Checo’s Destiny is the well from which Mad Bills draws its strength. The actors have little more than a handful of credits in shorts and TV spots between them, but they perform the full spectrum of youth’s impulsive idealism with the bravado of seasoned indie vets.
Destiny brings out the best in Rico, and her grasp on the couple’s cresting adulthood siphons the tenderness he holds for his family and community into strings of forward thinking that can occasionally approximate responsibility. Still, Vargas never forgets that his story is about two kids; the opportunism and charm that make Rico a pro at slinging cold drinks are just as quick to send him stumbling drunk toward the wrong stranger and tie him up with the cops. Vargas’ diligence behind the camera keeps Mad Bills from ever steering toward a morality play, but he’s not hesitant to let his subjects scrape their knees. To watch Rico and Destiny trip over themselves on their way toward the straight and narrow is to stomach the dread of knowing that your own kids are capable of every mistake you’d made at their age.
With Mad Bills, Vargas achieves the rare sort of debut feature that functions less as a promise of future work than it does a holistic insight of current competency. It’s an assured product of empathy and experience; countless directors have scribbled off love letters to the Big Apple, but few have offered such thorough proof of their time spent talking shit with neighbors across fences, of wincing toward LED army recruitment ads on the stairs down to the train, of watching the kid down the block get drunk for the first time and wondering whether you should say something to his mom. But Mad Bills’ biggest feat might be its refusal to punish its subjects or its audience for experiencing life: one way or another, the kids are growing up.
Published as part of New Directors/New Films 2025.
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