A recent college graduate moves back home, drifts along and strikes up an unlikely friendship with a single mother in this Sundance indie.
The American indie “Cha Cha Real Smooth” is the story of a young man finding himself. It isn’t much of a search. He’s pretty much the exact same easygoing, uninteresting guy at the end of the movie that he is at the beginning.
Things happen between the start and the finish of his journey inward, true. Mostly, though, feelings and hurts and slights are shared, and lessons learned, none surprising. He and the other characters talk and talk some more, and what they mostly talk about is him, the dim star at the center of this small, bland world.
“Cha Cha Real Smooth” had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. But don’t blame the festival, or not entirely. Sundance has always been greater, messier and more diverse — including aesthetically — than the clichés that cling to it. Over time those clichés have changed as the festival has transformed, from its early homespun years to its guys-with-guns era and endless tales of dysfunction. Yet if the festival has retained a reputation for feel-bad-so-you-can-feel-good navel-gazing, it’s partly because it puts a premium on young directors who deliver the most Sundance-y of Sundance movies: coming-of-age tear-jerkers.
Although “Cha Cha Real Smooth” opens with an obligatory flashback, Andrew (Cooper Raiff, who also directed) is 22 for most of the story. Recently graduated from college, he works at a fast-food joint and lives in a leafy New Jersey suburb with his mother, brother and stepfather. Andrew pines for his girlfriend, who’s abroad, and has vowed to follow her. But he has no clear path forward, views or interests. (No one here discusses the news, or shows curiosity about the larger world.) He’s nice, dull, quippy, with a toothy smile, full beard and slender frame that bring to mind the British actor David Tennant if David Tennant were a slobbering puppy.
Andrew’s path to adulthood largely involves his friendship with Domino (an unconvincing Dakota Johnson), an older, melancholic single mother of a teenager who has autism, Lola (an appealing, spikily real Vanessa Burghardt, who also has autism). Andrew meets them at a bar mitzvah where he’s chaperoning his brother. Andrew notices her straight away, you bet, and before long they’re beaming at each other, exchanging small talk and hitting the dance floor. Women smile at Andrew a lot; at one point, a gaggle of mothers from the bar mitzvah follow him into the parking lot and hire him as “their motivational dancer,” a.k.a. party starter.
Soon enough Andrew is playing M.C. at bar and bat mitzvahs, rocking them as he fumbles through the rest of his life. Raiff uses these parties for visual energy and comedy, and while he doesn’t deploy overt stereotypes he flirts with them. Certainly, it’s hard to see him wringing laughs as readily out of, say, confirmations or quinceañeras, much less staging a brawl at one, as he does here, ruining a bar mitzvah (for a kid named Benjamin Schindler, no less) so Andrew can have a teachable moment. As if to reassure the audience that it’s all in good fun, Domino says in one scene, “Sometimes I really envy Judaism.” “Same,” Andrew chirps.
Raiff also wrote and helped produce “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” so he is clearly ambitious. But if he has something to say about life, it’s not apparent from this movie. It’s derivative and unpersuasive, and as pandering as any big studio soft sell; it’s filled with stylistic clichés (hovering camerawork, mewling songs), cardboard characters, silly dialogue and absurd narrative contrivances, starting with Domino, a trite male fantasy who’s only a vessel for Andrew’s narcissism. Raiff shrewdly complicates this cliché a touch, though, again, only to exploit it. Their relationship never makes sense; but, then, neither does most of the movie.
I didn’t believe a single second in “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” but the movie isn’t trying to convince you of anything. It just wants you to like it. It wants you to smile, nod in recognition, shed a tear or two and feel good about yourself for liking it. It’s an exemplar of American indie entertainment at its most canned and solipsistic.
Indeed the most startling thing about the whole thing is Raiff’s regard for his own charms, which presumably explains the close-ups he lavishes on both Andrew and the women who indulge him. Again and again, they gaze on Andrew with misty eyes and crinkly smiles, bathing him in adoration that Raiff clearly shares.
Cha Cha Real Smooth
Rated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV+.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
