{"id":534572,"date":"2026-04-16T18:40:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T18:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/534572\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T18:40:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T18:40:17","slug":"mile-end-kicks-director-chandler-levack-is-a-recovering-music-critic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/534572\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Mile End Kicks’ director Chandler Levack is a recovering music critic"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the trailer for Chandler Levack\u2019s sophomore feature Mile End Kicks dropped last month, no fewer than five separate people texted me the link. I saw it on at least six \u201cclose friends\u201d stories on Instagram. It left me and my cohort of other young female music critics shell-shocked: to quote the now-memed Euphoria line, \u201cWait, is this fucking play about us?<\/a>\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The film, which takes place in 2011, centers around 22-year-old music critic Grace Pine (played excellently by Euphoria\u2019s own Barbie Ferreira) moving to Montreal in hopes of finding inspiration\u2014and, yes, herself\u2014as she tries to draft her 33 \u2153 book on Alanis Morissette. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) for her, she instead gets swept into the Montreal music scene, rapidly becoming enmeshed in the personal circle of up-and-coming band Bone Patrol,\u00a0 even falling into a love triangle with two of its members\u2014frontman and \u201cworst guy in Montreal\u201d Chevy (Stanley Simons) and sweet stoner guitarist Archie (Devon Bostick). The movie opens this Friday, the same day Levack\u2019s teen comedy Roommates drops on Netflix, making for what might be the busiest day of her career thus far.<\/p>\n

Over the course of Mile End Kicks, Grace cries to Joanna Newsom, dates horrible band guys, scribbles notes at shows, feels out of place at house parties, procrastinates on drafts due to self-loathing, dreams of living in Almost Famous, and struggles to balance the professional with the personal (as one guy tells Grace directly after sleeping with her, \u201cI feel like we should keep our relationship professional. You\u2019re an important contact in the industry.\u201d). She sends in invoices but isn\u2019t paid by her magazine for well over a month; she\u2019s made to feel incompetent by older male peers who don\u2019t take her or her taste seriously; she watches the light flicker out of a new acquaintance\u2019s eyes as soon as they learn that the publication she writes for is not, in fact, Pitchfork. She even clicks through emails from real-life publicist Brendan Bourke (hi Brendan!).\u00a0<\/p>\n

If it feels like Levack herself knows this world all too well, that\u2019s probably because she does: she spent nearly a decade in it herself. The Toronto-born, Burlington-raised writer-director ditched her cinema studies program at the University of Toronto at 18 to pursue writing full-time; by 20, she was interning at SPIN in New York, with bylines at the Village Voice, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, and the Toronto Star soon to follow. She even spent the summer of 2011\u2014the same summer the film is set in\u2014embedded in the very Montreal indie scene Grace stumbles her way through (and that I briefly stumbled my way through during Pop Montreal last September).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eventually, though, the pull toward making her own art outweighed her urge to write about other people\u2019s: Levack pivoted to directing music videos (earning back-to-back Juno nominations for her work with Toronto punk band PUP), then a short film (2017\u2019s We Forgot to Break Up, which premiered at TIFF), and, finally, features. Her 2022 debut I Like Movies\u2014a semi-autobiographical comedy about a pretentious teenage cinephile toiling away in a Burlington video store\u2014premiered at TIFF and earned the kind of rapturous critical response that tends to precede a much-buzzed-about sophomore feature.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mile End Kicks tracks the next era of Levack\u2019s life, taking inspiration from every aspect of her time as a critic in Montreal\u2014the music itself, of course, playing a large role. \u201cI would just constantly walk around the mile at two in the morning listening to [Tops\u2019] \u201cDouble Vision\u201d or \u201cOutside\u201d and obsessing over some guy while tears streamed down my face,\u201d Levack says, explaining how she knew Canadian outfit Tops had to be the band to soundtrack Bone Patrol. Archers of Loaf, Pavement, Built to Spill, and the Replacements were the main inspirations for Bone Patrol\u2019s all-too-familiar sound, which was built from the ground up by Tops themselves. Chevy\u2019s solo music, on the other hand, largely takes after John Maus (\u201cBennington\u201d is Levack\u2019s favorite love song of all time), although there\u2019s a song about a Korean grocery store (\u201cGochujang is my favorite thing \/ At the Korean supermarket\u201d) that\u2019s a Stanley Simons original\u2014apparently, he used it for his audition, and Levack basically cast him on the spot.<\/p>\n

As luck would have it, I met Levack entirely by accident. Roughly a week after the Mile End Kicks trailer dropped and dominated my very niche social media circles, I was at South by Southwest, queuing for a film premiere and mildly making conversation with my neighbors as we waited for the line to move. The woman next to me mentioned that she had a film playing at SXSW this year; when she said it was Mile End Kicks, I promptly lost my shit. What were the odds? We bonded briefly over our time in the music industry before arriving in front of the SXSW volunteer waiting to check us in. After Levack was whisked away by an usher, I immediately whipped out my phone to text Grace\u2014not Mile End Kicks\u2019 central young female music critic, but my real-life friend and Paste staff writer Grace, who is also, of course, a young female music critic. There are dozens of us! Dozens<\/a>!<\/p>\n

A month later, I hopped on a Zoom call with Levack to unpack Mile End Kicks, the world of music criticism, her experiences in the industry, and the odd transition from being the interviewer to the interviewee. She\u2019s as warm, quick, and self-deprecating as her films suggest, as well as startlingly candid about the whole strange business of being interviewed by, well, a 2026 version of 2011 her. The meta-ness of the whole thing was not lost on either of us. Somewhere, a fictional version of this same conversation is being typed up in Mile End. Art imitates life, and whatnot. The conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.<\/p>\n

******<\/p>\n

Paste Magazine: So lovely to meet you at South By and now talk to you here! Kismet, truly. I just saw Mile End Kicks and it was lovely\u2014but I\u2019ve gotta say, I did spend a lot of it distracted and horrified by the fact that the 22-year-old protagonist already had a 33 1\/3 deal. I felt very inadequate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chandler Levack: If it makes you feel any better, I definitely didn\u2019t have a 33 \u2153 when I was 22. [laughs] I didn\u2019t have my shit together enough to do that, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n

That does make me feel a bit better, actually. 33 \u2153 aside, though, how long did you work in the music criticism industry\u2014well, so much as it is an industry?<\/p>\n

Oh, great question. How long did I work in the industry? Did I work in the industry? I mean, I started when I was 18 and I probably stopped writing about music around ten years ago, give or take.<\/p>\n

Why did you get into it in the first place?<\/p>\n

Because of Almost Famous, literally. I saw that movie when I was 15 and I just was so floored by it. It kind of remains the most foundational art I\u2019ve ever seen in my life. And I was just like: \u201cHow do I live in the movie?! Well, I\u2019ll just become the main character. I\u2019ll start writing for magazines and newspapers.\u201d And I did. I did that when I was 18 and I dropped out of school\u2014I just went for it.<\/p>\n

Well, do you ever feel like you actually got to become Cameron Crowe?<\/p>\n

I mean, I guess if Cameron Crowe was, like, a 39-year-old single woman with a giant butt that makes movies, then sure. [laughs]<\/p>\n

He wishes. What was your experience like in the early days of being in the industry? Because obviously, Grace has a bit of a rough go of it in the film.<\/p>\n

It was both awesome and messy and complicated. I interned at SPIN when I was 20. I was living in New York in the summer of 2007. As a kid, I was just so deeply obsessed with New York, so it was such a dream come true\u2014beyond my wildest dreams, really. I would, like, go transcribe an interview with Thurston Moore, where he\u2019d be talking about the record store he was in when he found out that Kurt Cobain died, and then after work, I would walk to that record store and stand there to just soak up history. I would go on these rock pilgrimages. I remember I walked into the Chelsea Hotel and begged the concierge to let me sneak up to the roof\u2014and he let me do it, so I walked up to the roof, but then I immediately saw a naked man and he was like \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t be here.\u201d [laughs] Classic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the summer went on, I started working for the magazine full-time, because I think I was just so, like, \u201cI\u2019ll do anything.\u201d At the time, nobody cared about the internet or knew that the internet was a big deal for writing. The people at SPIN were like, \u201cWell, we have this thing called a website? And, I don\u2019t know, you could write for the website if you want.\u201d That was amazing, because I started interviewing bands all the time. That just kind of led me on this career: I started writing for them more often, and then writing for the Village Voice, and then I went back to Toronto and started working at mags there when I was 22.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But then moving to Montreal in the summer of 2011, I was so amazed by all of these young musicians who were just making art for art\u2019s sake. My whole life, I\u2019d been this weird professional\u00a0 child-adult, and this was like the first time that I was really around people my own age, partying and doing things and being part of something as opposed to just writing about and observing it., I think that\u2019s why that summer was so pivotal for me.<\/p>\n

Looking back on it now, I was so confident in my critical opinion as a writer then, but it was all formed by men in their 40s wearing plaid who loved the Hold Steady. I was just trying so hard to be their peer\u2014and I thought that I was! But now I\u2019m like, \u201cNo, you weren\u2019t; you were like a dog who could walk on its hind legs. A cute little prop or something.\u201d I don\u2019t know. The more I think about that time, the more I\u2019m like, \u201cWhat was that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A lot of the movie really revolved around being a young woman in this often older and male dominated space\u2014feeling like you need to take the opinions of other people as gospel in order to make any headway in the industry. What was your own journey with that like?<\/p>\n

I think it was writing the script for Mile End Kicks that made me really come to terms with that for the first time. I started writing it in 2015, when I was probably only about three years older than the character that I was writing about. And, you know, now I\u2019m in my late 30s. It was a decade of writing and rewriting the script, and admitting to myself that a lot of the canon for a long time that I found valuable\u2014in music, in art, in film\u2014was entirely shaped by these dudes who were my bosses and friends and mentors at the time. I wasn\u2019t curious enough to seek out other modes of thinking, because they were kind of the authority. A lot of my conversations and interactions were just pretending to know what they were talking about. Trying to have a seat at the table and parroting back the kinds of albums and filmmakers and writers that those guys liked so that they would like me\u2014even though I fucking hate B\u00e9la Tarr movies and I don\u2019t give a shit about H\u00fcsker D\u00fc or [Charles] Bukowski. Like, that stuff makes me want to sear my eyeballs; stab them with a sharp fork or something.<\/p>\n

It took me a long time to unpack my own misogyny in my taste in art and figure out what the fuck I had to say as a person and even admit to myself that I wanted to be a filmmaker. Because for a long time, criticism was very safe for me. It was kind of, like, adjacent to the thing that I wanted to do, but I didn\u2019t actually have to go through the pain and vulnerability of admitting that I wanted to be an artist myself. I always had a complex about it. You know, my mom would always tell me that being an artist was very indulgent. And, wow, wait till she sees what I\u2019ve been cooking up lately. [laughs]<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a part in the movie where Grace, if I\u2019m remembering correctly, says something like, \u201cDo you think that girls who date guys in bands just want to be the guy in a band?\u201d And on some level, I think there\u2019s a lot of truth to that. It\u2019s hard to be so close to art but not making it, you know?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s so true. You get close to it. The thing is, I\u2019ve never felt cool. And there was something about being a journalist and interviewing people and being on the list and all that\u2026 Like, in a very vulnerable time where I felt so socially awkward and self-conscious and repressed and terrified, being a music writer gave me a sense of identity, a sense of weird power, in a way, and just belonging. Because I could interview people, and if I could interview people, then I could make them my friends or prove to them that I had some kind of value. So a lot of my friendships and relationships were kind of formed by, like, writing about someone to make them love me.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s just really hard to be like, \u201cNo, I\u2019m just gonna focus on myself\u2014my own thoughts, my own feelings, what I want to say about the world.\u201d Because a lot of times in my life, I\u2019ve just been told, like, \u201cStop talking about yourself.\u201d It\u2019s scary to say out loud that you want to tell your own story, but the voice insisting I needed to just got louder and louder until I couldn\u2019t ignore it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019d imagine it was an odd transition, especially once I Like Movies got such rave reviews\u2014because now here you are, having a press cycle about you, rather than being one of the cogs pushing it forward. Being interviewed, rather than interviewing. What\u2019s it like being on the other side of the equation?\u00a0<\/p>\n

It feels so weird. One thing you don\u2019t realize when you\u2019re making these films in a vacuum is that you have to do public speaking and weird photo shoots and talk to, like, bloggers from sites called Rachel Loves Popcorn or something, and a lot of the conversation will be just: \u201cHow much of this thing is you? And what do you have to say about this? Tell us more about you!\u201d I don\u2019t like talking about myself. I get scared. My biggest fear is being perceived. I want the film to speak for itself, I don\u2019t see the point in me speaking for it. I don\u2019t want to be known. But that\u2019s a journalist\u2019s job: to know you, to get you to talk and say something interesting and compelling and new. So it\u2019s a very strange relationship.<\/p>\n

But, of course, I know what it\u2019s like to be on the other side. As a journalist doing interviews, it\u2019s this weird thing where like, for 15 minutes, you have absolute power. Like, one time I interviewed Armie Hammer\u2014pre-scandal!\u2014in a hotel room. For 15 minutes, Armie Hammer had to answer anything that I wanted to ask him. As a writer, I always wanted to get to the heart of why somebody makes things, but now, as the person being written about, you do kind of understand why people get burnt out: they\u2019re tired of answering the same question over and over again, or maybe they\u2019re just lonely and sad and exhausted.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Something I\u2019ve always thought was funny is that there\u2019s a very obvious power imbalance during an interview, but honestly, I feel like both sides think they\u2019re the ones on the bottom. The subject is at the mercy of the journalist, but the journalist is at the mercy of the subject, too\u2014they need access, need a story, and they\u2019re entirely reliant on the subject for that, who is typically also just a much more important and powerful person than the journalist. Both parties feel like they\u2019re the one on the back foot.<\/p>\n

Oh my god, that\u2019s so true. It\u2019s so weird! It\u2019s crazy to think, like, from 18 to 25, that\u2019s how I spent all of my time. The most formative years of my life, and it was just me doing that always. It\u2019s such a weird, weird thing\u2014to feel both powerful and like you have no power at all. I remember talking to the lead singer of the Flaming Lips, Wayne Coyne, about grief and his wife\u2019s mother dying, and how they were both so sad and traumatized by the experience of grief that all they did was have sex. How that was the best sex they\u2019d ever had, and it changed their relationship and their marriage. And some part of me was like, \u201cWhy are you telling me this? I\u2019m 21 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sounds like a killer interview, though.<\/p>\n

Oh, it was amazing. I would just luck into these great, candid interviews with people. I interviewed Joan Jett about The Runaways, and she was talking about working with Kristen Stewart, teaching Kristen Stewart how to play guitar. And she was like, \u201cKristen, if you hold your guitar like this, hold the amp like this, then you can use it as a vibrator to get off. So Kristen, push it to the wood, fuck your guitar.\u201d And I was like, \u201cOkay, writing this down.\u201d In hindsight, I kind of think my superpower was that I was just very small and disarming and surreptitious, so people were like, \u201cOh, I\u2019ll tell you stuff, because you don\u2019t even really seem like a journalist to me.\u201d People will tell you their secrets, because they don\u2019t view you as an actual journalist, just a lady with a tape recorder.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What are your thoughts on journalism and criticism these days?<\/p>\n

Honestly, journalism as a craft and profession just feels like it\u2019s becoming more and more undervalued. Now, it\u2019s like, \u201cWell, we don\u2019t need that. We\u2019ll just get you to do a TikTok where you answer silly rapid-fire questions, or play a drinking game, or try a bunch of, I don\u2019t know, British snacks.\u201d [laughs] I mean, I can see why actors and celebrities prefer to do those kinds of things sometimes, because it\u2019s safer\u2014they\u2019re not gonna have to be at risk of exposure. But it lessens the value of what great magazine journalism and profiles can do. I just miss real cultural critical engagement. It\u2019s becoming a lost art and that kind of breaks my heart.<\/p>\n

Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at\u00a0Paste\u00a0and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross<\/a>) or email her at\u00a0[email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the trailer for Chandler Levack\u2019s sophomore feature Mile End Kicks dropped last month, no fewer than five…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534573,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-534572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}