{"id":376695,"date":"2026-04-13T02:15:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T02:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/376695\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T02:15:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T02:15:07","slug":"barbie-ferreira-as-a-young-rock-critic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/376695\/","title":{"rendered":"Barbie Ferreira as a Young Rock Critic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tGrace (Barbie Ferreira<\/a>), the heroine of \u201cMile End Kicks<\/a>,\u201d is a 22-year-old music critic in Toronto who writes for an indie rock magazine called Merge Weekly, where the staff members are bro dweebs who stand around their cubicles engaging in fiery debates about whether H\u00fcsker D\u00fc\u2019s masterpiece is \u201cZen Arcade\u201d or \u201cFlip Your Wig.\u201d The year is 2011, and Grace has posted 400 articles for Merge in the last year. As working gigs for 22-year-old music critics go, that isn\u2019t bad.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd Grace is an incisive writer. Early on, we see her pitch an idea for the 33 1\/3 book series of single-album essay-meditations \u2014 she wants to write one on Alanis Morissette\u2019s \u201cJagged Little Pill,\u201d which she has a perfect bead on (\u201cI do feel that\u2019s the first time in the culture a young woman has expressed how fucking angry she was, and it actually translated to millions of dollars\u201d). She lands the contract, and decides to spend the summer writing her book in Montreal, a city the movie presents as the French-Canadian answer to Seattle in the \u201990s, full of clubs and loft parties and indie-rock hipsters living on \u201cbagels and cigarettes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIf Grace simply went to Montreal and wrote her book, there wouldn\u2019t be much of a movie. Instead, she dithers and ambles around. So does \u201cMile End Kicks.\u201d Let it be said: There are worse things a movie about a writer could do. \u201cMile End Kicks\u201d wants to mirror the haphazard freedom of a young woman out on her own, away from her home turf for the first time. To that end, the writer-director, Chandler Levack, establishes an agreeably slapdash attitude of hedonistic adventure, one that\u2019s often intentionally borderline cringe. <\/p>\n

\n\tGrace rents a room on Craigslist, and her roommates turn out to be a sexy French-Canadian couple \u2014 Madeleine (Juliette Gari\u00e9py), a DJ, and Hugo (Robert Naylor), a drummer \u2014 who introduce her to the local music scene. Her first night there, she sees a performance by Hugo\u2019s band, Bone Patrol, who sound like Pavement crossed with a cement mixer. Dressed in her nerdy-Catholic-school-girl-on-a-bender version of hot, she flirts with two of the band members: the guitarist, Archie (Devon Bostick), a cute pothead brainiac who is so polite he\u2019s celibate (all because he has oral herpes), and Chevy (Stanley Simons), the lead singer, who\u2019s described to her as \u201cthe worst guy in Montreal.\u201d Nothing we see dispels that description. He\u2019s a megalomaniacal space case who sings a song called \u201cKorean Supermarket\u201d and lolls around as if he thought he was the post-grunge answer to Jim Morrison.<\/p>\n

\n\tI like youth comedies that dither in a lifelike way (one of the greatest: \u201cThe Perks of Being a Wallflower\u201d). The trouble with \u201cMile End Kicks\u201d is that the movie tends to be lackadaisical and overstated at the same time. Chevy is such a selfish freak that he seems like an alien, and Archie is too pointedly the nice-grunge-sweetheart-waiting-in-the-wings. As for Grace, Barbie Ferreira, who plays a similar sensitive outsider in the current \u201cFaces of Death,\u201d isn\u2019t given enough dialogue to really allow the character to show her smarts, apart from the snippets we hear of her rock-crit writing.<\/p>\n

\n\tGrace\u2019s dilemma, as the film presents is, is that she\u2019s caught in the \u201ccool girl\u201d trap, working overtime to please the men around her, like Jeff (Jay Baruchel), her editor at Merge, who it\u2019s revealed she\u2019s been having a cold fling with. (He calls her in for \u201cmeetings\u201d where they have sex in his office.) But even a young woman struggling with the patriarchal conundrum of cool-girl syndrome (to be independent and accepted) might reveal more of a snappish turn of mind than Grace does.<\/p>\n

\n\tGrace\u2019s life starts to crack up and fall apart, and that is, of course, part of the adventure of being young and irresponsible. But I\u2019m not sure if I bought how it happens. The film establishes Grace as a scrupulous and ambitious writer, but when her book editor gives her an important note on the \u201cJagged Little Pill\u201d chapters she\u2019s turned in, saying that the writing needs to be more personal, Grace reacts as if the editor is an idiot (a bad editor would have wanted it less personal). She winds up blowing off the book in a reckless way, not even returning the editor\u2019s messages. Given how cautious and people-pleasing Grace is, that feels out of character.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer financial stability collapses, which I did believe (that\u2019s part of youth too), leading her to land work as the PR handler for Bone Patrol. But what\u2019s it like for a critic to suddenly be working as a publicist? That issue never even crosses the movie\u2019s mind. (It seems almost an afterthought that Grace looks happier as a publicist than she ever did as a writer.) The story is too loosely told to fully confront the nuts and bolts of the situations it shows us, which is why the closest thing \u201cMile End Kicks\u201d has to a structure is its undercooked echoing of \u201cReality Bites\u201d: Will Grace go for the sweet geek or the dreamboat dick? One of the reasons people still talk about \u201cReality Bites\u201d is that it was brazen enough to give you an unexpected answer. \u201cMile End Kicks\u201d doesn\u2019t come within a mile of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Grace (Barbie Ferreira), the heroine of \u201cMile End Kicks,\u201d is a 22-year-old music critic in Toronto who writes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[147276,156,196395,409,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-376695","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-barbie-ferreira","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-mile-end-kicks","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}