Sometimes, a romance feels so inevitable that no matter what either party does, the universe just keeps pushing them back together. Hollywood romances are often built on a formula of “Guy Gets Girl, Guy Loses Girl, Guy Gets Girl Back,” but the love stories that shape us the most often require running through that cycle quite a few more times, with no guarantees of happy endings.
The five-year romance between Charlie (Nick Robinson) and Harper (Emilia Jones) is nothing if not cyclical. It began as a high school flirtation, with the two artsy misfits burning CDs of their favorite songs and leaving them in each other’s lockers, content to let their favorite artists do the talking at an age when the prospect of socializing with people you like often feels like social suicide. They reconnect at a college party, initially feigning forgetfulness until a well-placed song on the aux cord makes it clear that their memories of each other were crystal clear.
That sparks a romance that sees them move to New Orleans together as Harper pursues her culinary dreams, only to find that his lack of ambition and struggles with substance abuse are hurdles that their relationship isn’t strong enough to handle. Years go by, and they each build their own separate lives until another spontaneous party encounter makes it clear that some feelings are harder to forget than your favorite song.
That might sound like a spoiler-laden summary of an entire movie, but “Charlie Harper” writer Tom Dean (who co-directs with Mac Eldridge) utilizes cyclical storytelling that gives you all of that information very early on. The film alternates between the three “first” meetings between the doomed couple, who are utterly incapable of suppressing their mutual attraction — at least, the first three meetings, because there’s every reason to believe it will happen again after the movie ends — cutting between the three legs of their relationship to illustrate that no amount of evolving external circumstances can change the fact that we love who we love.
The chemistry between the two young lovers is undeniable, but the wedges that eventually drive them apart are present from the beginning. He’s a quintessential “I Can Fix Him” project, handsome and self-destructive with pain behind his beautiful eyes and a taste for poetry and literature despite living in a trailer park with a history of depression and addiction in his family. She’s an ambitious planner with dreams of being one of the best chefs in the world, with the work ethic to do it. They’re drawn to each other because they both see that there’s more to the world than the sad little town they grew up in (and, let’s face it, because they’re both hot), but her obsession with rising above her station was always going to clash with his seeming contentment to drink himself into an early grave.
Dean and Eldridge know how to make a stylish film that manipulatively tugs on all the right emotional strings, and a few tears will probably be shed at the “Charlie Harper” premiere. It’s not hard to imagine the film finding an audience among younger indie film fans who either don’t remember movies like “(500) Days of Summer” or are simply eager to have one for their own generation. Those with a bit more viewing experience under their belts will probably grow bored of the film’s dependence on cliches, as it often feels like a bittersweet mixtape of old indie tropes: the manipulative power of nostalgia, the ways that seemingly inconsequential pieces of physical media can become formative memories, the euphoric feeling of falling in love and fantasizing about the big world waiting for you outside your hometown, and the realizations that even if love wasn’t enough, relationships can still shape us for the better.
Some movies get richer the more time you sit with them, but “Charlie Harper” is the kind of film whose impact will always be the strongest as you’re walking out of the theater. The lack of originality and occasional on-the-nose dialogue cancel out most of its rewatch value, but it’s hard not to be affected in the moment by the sincerity of its storytelling and the chemistry between Robinson and Jones. There have been multitudes of movies made about the toxic young romances that shape us into the more stable adults we eventually become, but the world will stop making them when they stop making us feel things. And “Charlie Harper” is proof that that day has not arrived yet.
Grade: B-
“Charlie Harper” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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