MILE END KICKS (TIFF 2025) – Review by Liz Braun
There was a lot of wind-up prior to TIFF for Chandler Levack’s (I Like Movies) new film, Mile End Kicks, which had its world premiere at the festival on September 4.
Mile End Kicks is a coming-of-age tale mixed with a bit of romantic comedy and it doesn’t quite live up to all the hype, but it’s an okay story with strong performances and great music.
Meet Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira), a music critic in her early 20s who leaves Toronto and moves to Montreal. The year is 2011, and Grace is determined to up her game and write a book about Alanis Morissette and Jagged Little Pill for the 33 ⅓ series; she’s also ready to immerse herself in the phenomenal indie music scene that has exploded in Montreal. Grace is a bit immature and keen to get out into the world, and Montreal is that ultra-cool, arts-saturated place where you can live on “bagels and cigarets”.
What a time to be alive.
Grace takes the bus out of Toronto, giving the CN Tower the finger as she goes. She has a list prepared of things she wants to accomplish over the summer in Montreal, and besides writing the book she intends to learn to speak French, walk to the top of the mountain and maybe even have proper sex with someone.
It’s a good list. It’s endearing.
In Montreal, in the artsy Mile End district, Grace has a roommate in Madeleine (Juliette Gariepy), a chic French Canadian DJ. Madeleine’s boyfriend Hugo mocks Grace for not being able to speak French, but that’s the only fly in the ointment.
It doesn’t take Grace long to land the 33 ⅓ Alanis Morissette book — she’s a good writer with a distinct feminist viewpoint. She also quickly becomes part of the music scene, meeting and writing about a band called Bone Patrol. Unfortunately, she falls for two different guys in the Bone Patrol band: the quirky sweet one (Devon Bostick) and the needy egotistical lead singer (Stanley Simons).
Somewhere in here there’s a little flashback to Grace in her former Toronto reviewer job, being preyed upon — for sex and for copious copy — by her editor (Jay Baruchel).
Thereafter, Grace begins to lose her way in Montreal: she’s out of money, she’s busy promoting Bone Patrol instead of writing her Alanis Morissette book, she ditches an important reading to pursue a boy. And she forgets a special DJ party session with Madeleine, who says to her, “Grace, you treat people like shit.”
Yeah, about that. At some point in Mile End Kicks, all the sweetness and whimsy vanishes, and the main character becomes increasingly difficult to care about. There’s a disconcerting disconnect in the writing; by the time Grace bucks up and begins to embrace adult life, we couldn’t summon the energy to care.
Mile End Kicks is entertaining up to a point and attractive for reasons of nostalgia and geography. Whether it has resonance with young women as a rite-of-passage story remains to be seen — a few fully three-dimensional characters in the protagonist’s orbit could have helped.
