Mile End Kicks (2025) ‘WIFF’ Movie Review: A Disappointing Second Effort From a Promising Young Director

Something went very wrong during the making of Mile End Kicks (2025). They created a sweet, likeable, and potentially relatable character and proceeded to strand her on L’Ile de Montreal with stick figures and no room to grow. It’s yet another instance of a disappointing second film from a talented director whose first one promised us so much more. Twenty-three-year-old Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira) is a music critic for a Toronto alternative newspaper who decides to move to Montreal for the summer in order to write a book on her heroine, Alanis Morissette. Why not Morissette’s actual hometown of Ottawa, where it would be easier and more convenient for her to do the necessary research? Because it’s 2011, and Arcade Fire’s Grammy win has helped cement Montreal’s status as the happening place for the Canadian music scene (besides, Ottawa is even more boring than Toronto).

She prepares a to-do list for her trip, which, besides the completion of her book, includes learning French and “having actual sex” (the clothed and passionless office romps with her sleazy editor don’t count). As might be expected, she only seems to take the last goal seriously. She gets seriously sidetracked when she decides to start covering a local indie band called Bone Patrol, whose members recoil violently at being compared to Pavement; I’m certain the actual members of Pavement would be relieved to hear this. Soon, she finds herself mired in less a love triangle than an attraction dilemma: is she more interested in the band’s handsome but obnoxious lead singer (Stanley Simons) or its seemingly nice but decidedly oddball guitarist (Devon Bostick)?

It goes without saying that Grace’s to-do list goes largely unfulfilled (including the sex part, although not without trying), and unfortunately, she fails to change much as a person as well. Writer-director Chandler Levack (who previously made the much superior “I Like Movies”) had worked for many years as a critic and reporter for SPIN and Toronto Life magazines, so the film’s failure to convey the intricacies and difficulties of the writing process is especially disappointing. We just see Grace take notes at a concert, organize chapters of her planned book, and that’s it, beyond a credible depiction of her profession.

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She doesn’t even come off as a particularly talented writer, despite her self-confident concluding assertions of her own abilities. The excerpts of her work we read are embarrassingly clichéd and self-indulgent, with strained comparisons linking Alanis to Sylvia Plath and Agnes Varda. At least she doesn’t misuse “ironic.” Her interview with the band is laughably inept, and while the comedy is intentional, it should surely come out of the band members being totally unprepared, not her.

Alanis Morissette fans will probably walk away the most disappointed, given that there’s so little of her actual music in the film. I only recognized “Hand in My Pocket,” and it sounded suspiciously remixed. When Grace plays what she calls her favorite song, it’s not even one of Morissette’s! The original songs are mostly mediocre and forgettable, except for a hilariously bad song about a Korean grocery store that sounds like an abortive attempt by Weird Al Yankovic at a Paul Westerberg-style parody.

We’re supposed to see some sort of analogy between Alanis’s songs and career and what Grace herself goes through, but only the most devoted Morissette scholars will be able to make a clear connection. Nor is a female empowerment theme truly in evidence, as most of Grace’s problems are clearly of her own making, and not the fault of the “patriarchy” or anyone else. Sure, nearly all of the male characters are jerks, and one of them takes terrible advantage of her, but it’s her own self-centeredness and lack of personal responsibility that’s mostly at fault here.

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She procrastinates on her writing duties, fails to keep proper track of her own finances, and wastes too much time at dance clubs and poetry slams to be worried about the consequences of her actions. We should ideally still be able to care about her because these are very identifiable flaws that most of us can see in ourselves, but unfortunately, not only does she fail to generate much sympathy despite being inherently likeable, but the film also fails to convince us that she has properly matured and learned to take responsibility for her actions by the conclusion. It’s all too sudden, too pat and settled to be a satisfying resolution.

Barbie Ferreira is adequate enough in the lead, I suppose, although she overdoes it with her facial expressions. It becomes far too easy to immediately know what she’s thinking in a given scene instead of having her feelings revealed subtly and gradually. The very likable Jay Baruchel is miscast as her scumbag boss, and neither Devon Bostick nor Stanley Simons develops their characters beyond the single dimensions proffered to them, and they wind up being equally annoying for different reasons. Isaiah Lehtinen, so good in “I Like Movies,” is cruelly wasted as the token LGBT character, only existing to be the target of homophobic jokes by his bandmates. The best performance is by Juliette Gariépy as Grace’s DJ friend and the only character fully displaying maturity and selflessness; she has the same delicate, dewy appeal as the young Julie Delpy.

Levack’s previous film, “I Like Movies,” was the coming-of-age story of an adolescent male cinephile, and while she may have shared that character’s film fanaticism, she did a remarkable job of crafting a three-dimensional study of someone who otherwise was mostly very different from her. With “Mile End Kicks,” she’s tried her hand at conceiving both a character and a storyline that may not be strictly autobiographical but is still obviously closely derived from her own life experiences. But this time, she has been unable to produce an equally well-developed and fully rounded portrait, and her sophomore effort rings false as much as her freshman film rang true. It’s just a little too ironic, don’t you think?