‘Mile End Kicks’ & The Purity of Writing
Chandler Levack has now written two characters who recognized me before I recognized myself. Both of them love art the way you're supposed to love a life, and both of them wake up halfway through their own story to the fact that they've been hiding inside someone else's.
The first time was with Lawrence Kweller, the seventeen-year-old cinephile in her debut I Like Movies who builds an entire personality out of film knowledge. He can rank Kubrick's filmography and quote Paul Thomas Anderson, but he can't have a conversation with his mother about his dead father. Lawrence uses movies like a barricade: he puts them between himself and everything that hurts. Lawrence completely changed my life. When I first wrote about I Like Movies for this site I was at a point in my life where I was doing the same thing with grief, using the death of someone I loved to justify staying small and avoiding everything that required me to grow. Lawrence's version of it was easier to see than mine, which is probably why I needed to see his first.
Still from I Like Movies
Lawrence taught me how to use writing as a way to understand my emotions. I Like Movies is one of those films I affectionately dub a permanent addition to the FilmSlop Canon (full review here), because without it I wouldn't be able to do the style of writing I do today. I started FilmSlop because I wanted a place where people could use film to talk about themselves honestly, where criticism meant locating yourself inside of a movie rather than quantifying it on a scale of one to ten. So many essays on this site (e.g., using Kedi to understand grief) trace back to what Lawrence did to me. I stopped hiding and started confronting myself through writing. I was proud of that. In the last few years, FilmSlop started gaining legitimacy. We grew our readership (thank you to everyone who reads these, love you all) and started covering larger festivals. By the time I was covering SXSW and watching Levack's latest film, Mile End Kicks, I felt a strong pride in the work I was doing.
Mile End Kicks follows Grace Pine, a twenty-four-year-old music critic who moves from Toronto to Montreal in 2011 to write a book about Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill. She has the contract, the advance, the taste, the passion, and most importantly, a real argument about the record. Instead of writing it, she gets distracted when she meets an indie band called Bone Patrol and volunteers to become their publicist. She books their shows, designs their flyers, and gets romantically entangled with two of them (Archie and Chevy), while the book collects dust all summer.
Grace is Levack with a decade of distance on her, and Barbie Ferreira plays her uncannily so. The styling is identical. The cadences match. Levack has the confidence and bravery to directly confront herself, and she refuses to protect herself from that proximity. It's an evolution from I Like Movies, where any confession Levack was making came through a body that wasn't hers. Mile End Kicks refuses the disguise.
Grace loves writing. She loves the book. She can pitch it wherever she goes, and no one can defend Alanis like she does. The only thing she won't do is the actual work, because loving the idea of the work is more intoxicating than the work itself. Eerily familiar.
Levack has a talent for writing characters who find a way to call me out on my worst habits. With Lawrence, I was already most of the way through my recovery by the time he called me out. I was aware. I already knew I was hiding behind grief before he showed it to me. Grace called me out on something I hadn't yet recognized in myself. There was a part of me that really was just writing to be seen. Somewhere in the last year, the fluency I built started covering for the thinking I wasn't doing. I started cutting corners because I'd learned I could. I started talking about FilmSlop more than I worked on it. I wanted the results without doing the work. I was abandoning the reason I started slopping.
Still from Mile End Kicks
I was getting a little addicted to the access. I was mesmerized by the press badges, the closeness to filmmakers, and the feeling of being in the room. I noticed it in the theater at SXSW and couldn't stop noticing it on the walk back.
I love FilmSlop. I want to say that clearly because everything here is in service of it. FilmSlop is the realest thing I've ever made. I started it with George because we both believed, and still believe, that the internet is designed to reward the opposite of what we're trying to do. Short, fast, vertical, disposable. The pull toward that pattern is real, and I've been letting it work on me without quite admitting it was working. Grace isn't in an attention economy, but the shape of her avoidance is the same as mine. She picks the band over the book because the band feels like a creative life without the friction of one. I've been picking the brand of being a critic over the practice of being one for the same reason. Levack knows this. The line from the trailer about how the girls who date guys in bands actually want to be in the band is basically the film's thesis, and it is also mine. I want to be in the band. I started the band.
Grace spends her summer in Montreal surrounded by music, convinced she's inside the thing, while her real work rots away. I have spent a year surrounded by writing, convinced I was fighting the good fight, letting the real work rot. Mile End Kicks opens April 17th. In the spirit of FilmSlop, I'm not going to end this essay on a neat bow or sanitize the conclusion. I'm a work in progress. I'm scared. I'm scared I'll be weak and let the glamor win. I'm scared I'll get swept up and abandon the thing I started this for. I'm going to try very hard not to.