Summary
With Cooper Raiff’s trademark open-hearted approach, this excellent character piece manages to invest a whole lot of emotion in a very compact space.
A few years ago, Cooper Raiff burst onto the scene with his debut feature Shithouse (aka Freshman Year), an adaptation of his own YouTube short Madeline & Cooper. It won Best Narrative Feature at SXSW. For his follow-up, Raiff has already won over the Sundance crowd, bagging the Audience Award for the Dramatic Competition back in January.
In fact, CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH could be a spiritual sequel to Shithouse. Where that film followed a young man concerned that he ‘didn’t do college right,’ here we see a coda of sorts. Raiff plays Andrew, a 20-something who works at a fast food joint while everyone else seems to be moving on. Finding work as a bar mitzvah party host, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her autistic teenage daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt).
It’s hard to get away from the word ‘sweet’ when describing Raiff’s work, which to date has been intimate and casually endearingly. It’s certainly a word that you’d use to describe Andrew, who goes out of his way to care for Domino and Lola in the absence of Domino’s finance. He’s by no means a perfect human being, often misreading others while finding his way in the world. He lashes out at stepfather Greg (Brad Garrett), gets drunk at work, and is unable to stay out of fights with bullies at his brother’s (Evan Assante) school.
“It feels like you don’t remember what better feels like.”
Yet like Raiff’s first film, here is a piece that wears its heart on its sleeve, and Raiff is the anchor in every scene. Set primarily in and around a rotating series of parties and mitzvahs, and there seems to be a lot of them, Andrew’s encounters with each of the characters allows them to reveal a little something about their own fears and anxieties. Case in point is his relationship with his bipolar mother (Leslie Mann), who is caught between supporting Andrew and giving him a final push out of the nest.
The film also continues a terrific series of roles for Johnson, following her award-recognised performance in The Lost Daughter. Here she gets to explore the complexity of Domino, a person who wants to be firmly planted while contradictorily seeking other forms of escape. Raiff plays the relationship between her and Andrew with enough subtlety that there is an inevitability to it without it being wholly expected.
With CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH, Raiff solidifies his position of a filmmaker with a distinct point of view. Whether you view this as a window into a particular cultural circle or simply a study of people lost in their own environment, Raiff has a strong sense of character. It will be interesting to see what he does if given a larger canvas to play with, or perhaps even something episodic, in future outings.
2022 | USA | DIRECTOR: Cooper Raiff | WRITER: Cooper Raiff | CAST: Dakota Johnson, Cooper Raiff, Raúl Castillo, Odeya Rush, Evan Assante, Vanessa Burghart, Brad Garrett, Leslie Mann | DISTRIBUTOR: Apple TV+, SXSW 2022 | RUNNING TIME: 108 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 11-20 March 2022 (SXSW), TBA (Apple TV+)
