Written and directed by Mike Mills
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffman, Woody Norman, Scoot McNairy
Runtime: 1 hour 48 minutes
In theaters now

by Audrey Callerstrom, Staff Writer

To date, the majority of Mike Mills filmography, including Beginners (2010), Twentieth Century Women (2016), and C’mon C’mon, all have similar themes on parent-child relationships. Beginners was, in part, about not knowing a parent until the very end, and how that alters the memories of your childhood. Twentieth Century Women was about knowing a parent and seeing the influences they have on the people around them. C’mon C’mon is a slice of life story, Mills’ take on the familiar tale of a person, who, due to a crisis, suddenly needs to take on a parental role. But don’t expect the dramatic peaks here that we saw in, for example, Manchester by the Sea. C’mon C’mon manages to stay in the vein of cute and sweet, at times to its detriment.

Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) is uncle to nine-year-old Jesse (Woody Norman), and needs to care for him while Johnny’s sister Viv (Gaby Hoffman) cares for Jesse’s dad (Scoot McNairy), who is going through a major depressive episode. Unaware of how long she will be gone, Johnny initially stays in Viv’s house with Jesse in Los Angeles. But Johnny is a documentarian who travels around and interviews people for, I expect, NPR-like projects, and so Jesse follows Johnny from Los Angeles to New York City and later, New Orleans. Jesse is an affable, sweet, smart kid. He has peculiar quirks; he likes to pretend that he’s a kid in an orphanage, or that he is a kid who has died. Viv assures Johnny it’s normal and to play along. Johnny is single, never married, although as he reveals from Jesse’s prodding questions, he’d like to be.

Phoenix has that affable uncle energy in this film. He’s trying to navigate taking care of a child, and is genuinely surprised by how a child has so much energy at the end of the day when you have so little. But the film doesn’t really want to know Johnny, so it tends to feel pretty neutral toward him as a character. The one character here that the film could have spent more time with is Viv, a professor and mother who has spent years as a caretaker to both Jesse and Jesse’s dad. There are poignant conversations between Viv and Johnny over the phone, about caring for children and how their minds work. We get to see, albeit briefly, what it’s like for Viv to take care of Jesse’s dad, who is resistant to treatment for his manic depression and is prone to disappearing and making rash decisions. So why not, I wonder, tell this film from the point of view of Viv, instead of Johnny? Viv is more three-dimensional than Johnny, and Gaby Hoffman gives a great performance in her small handful of scenes.

I suspect that Mills wanted to combine moments of Johnny and Jesse with scenes of Johnny interviewing young urban kids and asking them questions like, what do you want to change about yourself? What do you think the future will be like (Better? Worse?) These scenes don’t add anything to the film, they just drag it down and bloat its running time. I struggled to pay attention during the scenes of child after child, none whom we get to know by name, prattling on about their thoughts and feelings. Is there really an appetite out there for a cutesy audio documentary where kids talk about the future? It feels more like Kids Say the Darndest Things than any kind of meaningful project. 

Shot in black-and-white, C’mon C’mon is best when it leans into dramatic tension, even if that tension feels as incidental as Jesse getting lost at a convenience store, or Johnny fainting during a parade. While some dialogue-free flashback scenes hint at tension between Johnny and Viv related to their late mother, who appeared to have dementia, adding that depth could have brought more dimension to their relationship. We get a window into who these characters are, but not a door. Woody Norman as Jesse never tries to play a pretentious kid. At all times, he looks and feels like a normal kid. He’s disheveled, he’s grumpy, he’s unsure. C’mon C’mon could have stood to back away from some of the quirky indie tropes, like two characters shouting cathartically, but it’s still a pleasant, well executed film.