Having decided myself to migrate from a Toronto suburb to Montreal in my young adulthood shortly after hearing Visions for the first time, I am perhaps a few inches short of the requisite “critical distance” to pen a sober review of Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks. My notes are preoccupied with the slightest inaccuracies altogether immaterial to the success of the film — would the alt-weekly office where the lead character works feasibly have a Nathan Fielder poster in 2011? Was Mac DeMarco, name-dropped as such, not still operating under his Makeout Videotape alias that year? Would the fictional band at the film’s centre really have a Québécois nationalist playing drums?
Mile End Kicks takes for its subject Grace (Barbie Ferrara), a young female rock critic who leaves her column at an Ontarian alt-weekly for La Belle Province, where she plans to write her 33 ⅓ paean to Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Fleeing the chauvinists running her Ontarian alt-weekly, led by a particularly nefarious EIC (Jay Baruchel), Grace quickly becomes enmeshed with the slightly more interesting species of male manipulators then dominating the Montreal music scene. Demonstrating these dynamics, Levack likes to situate Grace on the edge of a circle, peering over shoulders that seem to purposefully inch back into her eyeline.
Grace writes of Alanis Morrissette that “she wielded her autobiography like a weapon.” Morrissette was unabashedly Canadian and, with Jagged Little Pill, unrelentingly angry with a patriarchal music industry determined to turn her into something she wasn’t. Levack’s muse walks in a similarly autobiographical direction: the director’s first feature (2022’s I Like Movies) tackled her first job as a video store clerk, and now her second is informed by her second job as a rock critic. These regional environs are evoked with a bubbling affection that’s nevertheless vigilant about the pitfalls of nostalgia. After decamping to Montreal via Megabus, Grace moves in with her roommate (Juliette Garriépy of Red Rooms), a local DJ who is dating the aforementioned Québécois drummer (Rob Naylor), member of fictitious local legends Bone Patrol. With an acknowledged debt to Almost Famous (2000), Levack has Grace fall in lust with the band’s singer (Stanley Simons) and become the band’s de facto publicist, against the ignored-until-it-can-be-ignored-no-longer backdrop of the rest of her life falling apart.
Despite the fresh cultural victory of Cindy Lee, recent revelations about Grimes and Arcade Fire have rendered the Montreal indie moment of the early aughts difficult to regard through rose-tinted glasses (a costume choice that features in the film). This being the only feature portrait of the city in that moment — god willing, Xavier Dolan stays retired — there’s an inevitable quotient of mythologizing, but Levack is never less than clear-eyed about the foibles of Grace’s equally inevitable falling in love with Montreal. The targets are both well-worn (men who read David Foster Wallace, you’re on notice) and slightly more niche (Pere Ubu, of all bands, catches a stray). But if this can feel like Levack’s autobiographical weapon might be a bit of a foam sword, her love-hate relationship with the scene is nonetheless able to cut deep, yielding real insight into the play of toxic elements that at once attracts and repels us as (hopefully) young people.
Still writing her Toronto column, Grace inserts a long-awaited CD copy of Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me into her work computer disk drive, having moments before been abused by her boss not, one feels, for the first time. Through tears, she types: “Strings so good they emulsify your organs.” It’s been well observed that memories of one’s twenties are inevitably tethered to the emotional tumult coloring one’s life in that decade, but perhaps never quite so directly.
Mile End Kicks goes some way toward defining a certain Barthesian myth of Montrealicity — bagels, loft parties, gender-playful indie rockers. Fortunately, the summer setting abrogates with the obligatory mention of the famed little black toques. It bears mentioning that the film is named after a shoe store located in the titular neighbourhood, one that surely induces a cringe in any self-conscious resident (think of a restaurant called “Brooklyn Style Pizza” in Williamsburg, and you’re halfway there). The most exciting and weirdest parts of the scene (The Unicorns, early Grimes) are replaced by the anodyne pop stylings of TOPS, who composed Bone Patrol’s lead single. Seeing a place so significantly entwined with my own past reduced just so, and populated with various anachronisms, I watched helplessly as, unbeknownst to myself, my own notes began to register my own shift into Grace’s eyeline, boxing her out of a circle of “true” Montrealers. But Levack’s stubbornly sober look at this myth compelled me to drop my gate-keepers key. There’s just enough venom in her sentiment, just enough affection in her takedown, to disarm the calculated coldness patrolling the limits of any scene.
Montreal is as much mine as it is Grace’s as it is Levack’s. It’s a made-up place perpetually ripe for re-definition, perpetually redrawing its boundaries as gentrification encroaches year by year. Today’s posers are tomorrow’s legends, time is a flat bagel. “Art should be hard to make,” the male manipulator-singer speaks in a vocal fry for maximum cringe. Pere Ubu might have agreed, but Levack’s art is to situate the revelations of young adulthood (“everyone is just as nervous as you” seems so simple in retrospect) in the embattled mind of the young adult living through them. We’d do well to remember that romance and disappointment were not always so clearly delineated.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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