Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022 | USA | 107 minutes | Cooper Raiff)
As he demonstrated with Shithouse, Cooper Raiff is so incredibly great at making deeply sentimental movies about the extremely emotionally available as they experience fleeting life-changing moments that you suspect he gives them silly titles as a handicap. His follow-up, which premiered in the US Dramatic Completion at Sundance this weekend, is called Cha Cha Real Smooth and concerns a recent college graduate who stumbles into a job as a party-starter on the suburban New Jersey bar mitzvah circuit during an aimless summer after graduating from Tulane. Writing, directing, and casting himself in a starring role with Dakota Johnson as his love interest is enough to make you hate the upstart auteur if the results weren’t such an absolutely joyous delight.
Maybe it’s just my advanced age, having grown up in the afterglow of the reflexive cynicism and detached irony of a generation whose time on the Oregon Trail was a primer for omnipresent internet, that leaves me quietly jealous of a new zoomer generation for whom kindness and public display of feelings isn’t grounds for immediate suspicious rejection. So watching Cooper Raiff’s character Andrew being nice to his mother (Leslie Mann), crashing on his teenage brother’s bedroom floor, accompanying them to a bar mitzvah, and having an instantaneous instinct for getting a bunch of strangers to enjoy themselves on the dance floor feels like a view into an alien youth culture that I both admire and find deeply mysterious.
The movie opens with a glimpse of Andrew’s origin story, a flashback to an awkward kid at (yes) a bar mitzvah who (indeed) becomes infatuated with the beautiful woman in a glittery jacket who’s (of course) leading the kid in all of their dances and whose love is cemented (naturally) when he sees her having a sad phone call on a break but (here’s the kicker) putting on her party face when it’s time to get back to work. The thirteen-year-old’s earnest attempt to ask her out for a date goes predictably bad, but it’s a first heartbreak that’ll come back to shape his personal brand a decade later when he finds himself adrift after graduation when, in an apartment full of partying classmates, his girlfriend laughs when he earnestly and drunkenly tells her that his plans for the future involve following her on her Fulbright to Barcelona. Instead, he finds himself back in Jersey, working a terrible mall food court job, squabbling with his new stepfather (Brad Garrett, surprisingly good), and tagging along on the teenage party circuit.
It’s at this party, full of awkward teens and bored parents, that we first see Andrew’s near-pathological instincts to be helpful kick into gear. He works the room with his scruffy charm, balancing some kind of master equation to please all and offend none to get the kids and adults out of their seats and onto the dance floor.
His biggest challenge in winning the whole room over is a gorgeous scandalized mom whose autistic daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt) is more comfortable solving complex Rubik’s cubes than busting a move. He somehow works his magic, getting the kid out of her seat, much to the surprised relief of her mother. Dakota Johnson (a co-producer on the film, who between this and The Lost Daughter is having quite a moment in roles of mothers in emotional distress) gives a multifaceted performance in the role of Domino, resilient and guarded, yet in need of occasional rescue, often from the complications that she creates to bristle against the stability of settling down with her often-absent fiancee.
Andrew saves the day for her multiple times that night and, via his uncanny ability to be helpful, quickly finds his way into their lives. As they circle from an instantly intense friendship into something like an ill-advised romance, he also gains a second pseudo-career at being the spice of every kid’s party. Along the way, he becomes a fixture in Lola’s life while still making time to help his very cute younger brother (Evan Assante) navigate the five most important lessons to securing a first kiss. Raiff plays the Andrew’s seemingly infinite instinct toward kindness and preternatural people-pleasing, not as pathetic or psychotic, but as a deeply charming shield for his uncertainty about his own wants and needs.
In less steady hands this material could be deeply cringeworthy, but it’s amazingly affecting. Raiff balances the sentimentality through subtly assured character development and unflashy yet effective editing. The film is stocked with simple, moving, clumsily insightful conversations. Its earnest gestures of affection — both familial and romantic — vibrate with melancholy and anticipation. Despite it’s talk of soulmates and first loves, the film’s ultimate success is in the softness of its ambitions and the confidence to allow his story to simply memorialize the huge feelings that accompany being a confused twentysomething who needs to learn that he’s still kind of an idiot so that he can get on with the very difficult process of starting to grow up.
This review originally ran when Cha Cha Real Smooth played as part of the US Dramatic Competition at Sundance. Since then, it was acquired and sees a simultaneous release in theaters, locally at SIFF Uptown, and on AppleTV+ beginning June 17th.