‘Mile End Kicks’ Review: Barbie Ferreira Is a Young Music Critic in an Indie-Rock Comedy Where Reality Bites

Grace (Barbie Ferreira), the heroine of “Mile End Kicks,” is a 22-year-old music critic in Toronto who writes for an indie rock magazine called Merge Weekly, where the staff members are bro dweebs who stand around their cubicles engaging in fiery debates about whether Hüsker Dü’s masterpiece is “Zen Arcade” or “Flip Your Wig.” The year is 2011, and Grace has posted 400 articles for Merge in the last year. As working gigs for 22-year-old music critics go, that isn’t bad.

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And Grace is an incisive writer. Early on, we see her pitch an idea for the 33 1/3 book series of single-album essay-meditations — she wants to write one on Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill,” which she has a perfect bead on (“I do feel that’s the first time in the culture a young woman has expressed how fucking angry she was, and it actually translated to millions of dollars”). She lands the contract, and decides to spend the summer writing her book in Montreal, a city the movie presents as the French-Canadian answer to Seattle in the ’90s, full of clubs and loft parties and indie-rock hipsters living on “bagels and cigarettes.”

If Grace simply went to Montreal and wrote her book, there wouldn’t be much of a movie. Instead, she dithers and ambles around. So does “Mile End Kicks.” Let it be said: There are worse things a movie about a writer could do. “Mile End Kicks” wants to mirror the haphazard freedom of a young woman out on her own, away from her home turf for the first time. To that end, the writer-director, Chandler Levack, establishes an agreeably slapdash attitude of hedonistic adventure, one that’s often intentionally borderline cringe.

Grace rents a room on Craigslist, and her roommates turn out to be a sexy French-Canadian couple — Madeleine (Juliette Gariépy), a DJ, and Hugo (Robert Naylor), a drummer — who introduce her to the local music scene. Her first night there, she sees a performance by Hugo’s band, Bone Patrol, who sound like Pavement crossed with a cement mixer. Dressed in her nerdy-Catholic-school-girl-on-a-bender version of hot, she flirts with two of the band members: the guitarist, Archie (Devon Bostick), a cute pothead brainiac who is so polite he’s celibate (all because he has oral herpes), and Chevy (Stanley Simons), the lead singer, who’s described to her as “the worst guy in Montreal.” Nothing we see dispels that description. He’s a megalomaniacal space case who sings a song called “Korean Supermarket” and lolls around as if he thought he was the post-grunge answer to Jim Morrison.

I like youth comedies that dither in a lifelike way (one of the greatest: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”). The trouble with “Mile End Kicks” is that the movie tends to be lackadaisical and overstated at the same time. Chevy is such a selfish freak that he seems like an alien, and Archie is too pointedly the nice-grunge-sweetheart-waiting-in-the-wings. As for Grace, Barbie Ferreira, who plays a similar sensitive outsider in the current “Faces of Death,” isn’t given enough dialogue to really allow the character to show her smarts, apart from the snippets we hear of her rock-crit writing.

Grace’s dilemma, as the film presents is, is that she’s caught in the “cool girl” trap, working overtime to please the men around her, like Jeff (Jay Baruchel), her editor at Merge, who it’s revealed she’s been having a cold fling with. (He calls her in for “meetings” where they have sex in his office.) But even a young woman struggling with the patriarchal conundrum of cool-girl syndrome (to be independent and accepted) might reveal more of a snappish turn of mind than Grace does.

Grace’s life starts to crack up and fall apart, and that is, of course, part of the adventure of being young and irresponsible. But I’m not sure if I bought how it happens. The film establishes Grace as a scrupulous and ambitious writer, but when her book editor gives her an important note on the “Jagged Little Pill” chapters she’s turned in, saying that the writing needs to be more personal, Grace reacts as if the editor is an idiot (a bad editor would have wanted it less personal). She winds up blowing off the book in a reckless way, not even returning the editor’s messages. Given how cautious and people-pleasing Grace is, that feels out of character.

Her financial stability collapses, which I did believe (that’s part of youth too), leading her to land work as the PR handler for Bone Patrol. But what’s it like for a critic to suddenly be working as a publicist? That issue never even crosses the movie’s mind. (It seems almost an afterthought that Grace looks happier as a publicist than she ever did as a writer.) The story is too loosely told to fully confront the nuts and bolts of the situations it shows us, which is why the closest thing “Mile End Kicks” has to a structure is its undercooked echoing of “Reality Bites”: Will Grace go for the sweet geek or the dreamboat dick? One of the reasons people still talk about “Reality Bites” is that it was brazen enough to give you an unexpected answer. “Mile End Kicks” doesn’t come within a mile of that.