by Robert Bouffard, Editor
Cooper Raiff broke onto the scene with his indie darling Shithouse in 2020. It was an honest, sweet, and wholesome look at what it’s like to be introverted in college while being away from home for the first time. In his latest film, Cha Cha Real Smooth, which Apple TV+ acquired after its premier at the Sundance Film Festival, Raiff took that same wholesome energy and made a movie about a person the next stage of life directly after college.
Andrew (Raiff) is fresh out of college, living at home, doesn’t have a “real” job (he works at “Meat Sticks” in the mall food court), and generally feels pretty directionless. He’s stuck in that typical sense of malaise that many Americans in their 20s experience. That is until he secures a recurring gig as a party starter for the bar and bat mitzvahs of his younger brother’s classmates. In doing so, he meets Domino (Dakota Johnson) and Lola (played wonderfully by newcomer Vanessa Burghardt — Johnson will get lots of talk surrounding her performance, but Burghardt is in many ways the emotional center of the film thanks to her standout performance), Domino’s daughter who is on the autism spectrum and who was born when Domino was very young.
Based on the synopsis, it’s already apparent that this movie would mine some of the same, indie-feeling, sentimental oeuvre of Shithouse. It’s singularly from Raiff, yet again, as he writes, directs, stars, and produces his second straight film. And the initial, most striking aspect of Cha Cha is how it feels like it was made by someone in the same position as its main character. That active uncertainty in which Andrew — an extrovert, in contrast to Shithouse’s Alex — helps everyone but himself permeates the entire film until it’s so effectively and emotionally resolved in the closing scenes. Domino is in her 30s and is engaged to a man she doesn’t seem to actually want to marry; Lola is bullied and picked on by the boys in her grade who think she is too tall; David (Evan Assante), Andrew’s brother, has his first middle school girlfriend and is constantly asking Andrew for advice on how to initiate their first kiss; Andrew’s mom (Leslie Mann) is no longer married to Andrew and David’s father, and has gotten married to Stepdad Greg (Brad Garrett), who Andrew describes as, “an unhappy pharmaceutical exec.” Andrew’s always looking outwards, trying to help the people in his life achieve their goals, but doesn’t take the time to focus on himself.
From there, it should be obvious why the 20-something anxiety is the main sticking point of the film. Andrew tells David that you don’t really find yourself until your junior year of college, but it’s quite apparent that he doesn’t even believe that himself. He’s now graduated and is no closer to knowing what he wants to do than he was prior to his freshman year. This is all tenderly communicated through the filmmaking and dialogue. Raiff frames his subjects matter-of-factly — there’s nothing especially fancy going on with the camerawork — which lets the dialogue and true-to-life characters shine through more than they would otherwise. While there are plenty of scenes of middle schoolers (supervised) partying, the most effective moments come from the small and intimate conversations characters have — Andrew and Domino eating ice pops in the kitchen discussing mental health; Andrew and David hanging out, just being brothers; Andrew sitting for Lola so Domino can have a night out, which may be the sweetest scenes I’ll see in a movie all year. All these scenes feel what producer Erik Feig calls humanist. The film isn’t interested in being an archetypal rom-com, or even simply quirky. Raiff infuses every moment and every interaction with the same vulnerability that he displays even in interviews.
It’s difficult to find warts on this movie because, frankly, there aren’t many. Raiff is so earnest and sincere with his motives that it’s hard to be cynical about what he’s doing. If anything, it all just seems a bit too saccharine and happy with itself for not having it all figured out. It’s not difficult to explicate that Raiff made a movie about someone his age trying to figure everything out… while he himself is doing the exact same. Paradoxically, it at once works for and against the movie. It works for it because the art is being true. We’re all in a perpetual state of looking for what will help us, while also balancing how that relates to the people around us. But it also works against it, ever so slightly, because it’s not really clear if there’s too much deeper than, “Life is messy; we’re all working our way through it.”
Though this may be a message we’ve heard hundreds of times before from hundreds of different movies, Cha Cha Real Smooth, named after the part in the “Cha Cha Slide” “where you do your own dance,” exudes such a spirit of optimism, even when it’s breaking your and the characters’ hearts. It tells its story in such a singular way that it still feels separate from other movies with a similar message. Just like the characters, the movie does its own dance. Similarly, we each have to do our own dance, find what works for us in our own lives, and realize it’s never too late to find it.
You can follow Robert Bouffard on Twitter and Letterboxd