In 2021, Licorice Pizza charmed audiences across the world, even if its main characters exposed an age gap between them that might make some protest. Movies like these prove that age is nothing but a number and youthfulness can simply be a part of one’s spirit up until the very end of their days. But, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing, young people under the age of twenty-five are showing signs of being worn down by the panic, isolation, and crisis the world is facing each day. While UNESCO reports that more than 830 million lost access to education during the pandemic, other statistics say mental health issues, too, are at an all-time high. Maybe that is why individuals turn to movies in times of need, whether it is to see themselves reflected on the screen or find a slice of life to escape into for a brief period. Cha Cha Real Smooth is one of the movies fitting that bill quite well.
Twenty-five-year-old Cooper Raiff would direct, write, and star in Cha Cha Real Smooth, but it is not his debut feature film. That title goes to his previous movie, Freshman Year, a coming-of-age comedy-drama that took home the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at South by Southwest. Dakota Johnson (The Lost Daughter) would produce the film movie under her production company, TeaTime Pictures, and star in it as well. After premiering at Sundance Film Festival, Apple acquired the movie for its streaming platform, AppleTV+, for 15 million USD and secured the film a release date of June 17, 2022.
Raiff directed and portrays the main character, while Johnson is opposite him as a mother with an autistic daughter. The remainder of the cast is rounded out by Leslie Mann (Motherless Brooklyn, I Love You Phillip Morris), Brad Garrett (Casper, Single Parents), Odeya Rush (Lady Bird), and Raúl Castillo Jr. (Looking), among others. Johnson, one of the biggest names in the cast due to her notoriety for appearing in Fifty Shades of Grey, embraces her age, implies in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that she is looking to pave a different path now in her acting career. Cha Cha Real Smooth, a collaborative effort with the newcomer Raiff, is one step in that direction, and so is her role in the upcoming version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion coming out in the summer of 2022, as well as being cast in Marvel’s Madame Web.
A College Graduate Comes Home
Cha Cha Real Smooth centers itself around the experience of Andrew (Raiff), a new college graduate returning home for the first time in a while. He is not doing what the stereotypical graduate is planning to do: working a corporate job. Instead, Andrew is making classic American fare at his town’s local fast food joint. While attending a local bat mitzvah that is pretty boring, he becomes a surprising hit with the local moms when his edition of the Cha Cha Slide manages to make the dance floor a lot more electrifying. Before he knows it, all the local moms want to hire him for their bat mitzvahs. All he needs is to make enough money to head to Barcelona, where his girlfriend from college currently is, and then life will naturally plan itself out for him.
This is how he meets Domino (Johnson), who will change his plans pretty quickly. Domino is one of those moms, but the two spark a peculiar relationship that cannot help the inevitable comparisons to last year’s Licorice Pizza. While Andrew is twenty-two, Domino is in her thirties and has an autistic daughter, placing them in two completely different orbits that collide when they first meet at a bat mitzvah. However, this fateful meeting is given a prelude early on, as a twelve-year-old Andrew is depicted as having a crush on a woman almost double his age at the time. This little prologue not only helps establish that Andrew has a thing for older women from puberty onwards but also offers a hint as to how this story could potentially end. First love does not always go so well, and from the get-go, it seems like Andrew's love life is nearly non-existent.
However, it becomes increasingly obvious that despite the age gap, these two are more similar than they appear. Although Domino may have had more life experience and had a child when she was a young woman, Andrew and Domino are both trapped in the same cycle that can be summed up as “circumstance.” Andrew does not have his dream nonprofit job and his college girlfriend might be having the time of her life studying in Europe, but Domino also is in a situation she is not happy with: she is engaged to the wrong person. As these two begin to hit it off this becomes a charming indie drama that reminds audiences what it is like to be twenty-two or feel like one is still in the wrong place during their thirties. This is relatable content in its essence, an honest way of seeing the world and how it functions for certain people daily.
Its Strengths Lie in Comfort
There is something about Cha Cha Real Smooth that feels genuine like it came from a truly lived experience that the writer, which is Raiff, knows well. Another key aspect that pulls this all together is the characters: they feel like real people that one would meet at a New Jersey bat mitzvah. As Andrew begins to babysit Domino’s daughter Lola and grows closer to both Domino and Lola, the viewer also gets an inside glimpse into his life at home. His mother suffers from bipolar disorder and his stepfather, who Andrew does not get along with, is a pharmaceutical executive with a strict personality. His thirteen-year-old brother, the same age as Andrew when he first had a crush on a woman older than him, is going beginning to navigate romance as a budding teenager too, causing some friction there.
But, at the same time, it does not feel like these characters are fleshed out to their maximum potential. The movie progresses through scenes and narrative arcs fluidly, but, at times, it feels a little too neat for some of the characters, almost too comfortable and clean. Each actor does their job well, especially the lead duo. Since the story heavily relies on being inside Andrew’s head and how his life is and is not falling apart, it avoids the harder subjects that could add more depth to the story. His mother’s struggle with bipolar disorder, the impacts of divorce on his family, and his own brother’s coming-of-age story feel like backdrops, puzzle pieces to broader societal issues.
Domino stands out in this story, providing a surprising anchor that feels solid in terms of characterization and her character’s path in the overarching narrative. Johnson showed the depth of her acting abilities recently in The Lost Daughter, but she has come a long way since appearing in Fifty Shades of Grey. Another standout performance lies in Vanessa Burghardt’s portrayal of Domino’s daughter Lola. Burghardt is a newcomer to the acting scene, but her appearance is distinct because she is actually on the autism spectrum. Casting director Angela Demo revealed in an interview with Backstage that Burghardt was found through a network of children’s theaters, so the world may be seeing more of the actress on the stage or big screen relatively soon.
Cha Cha Real Smooth has the heart and soul to be something great but misses the mark with execution. This is a role Raiff has played before: in Freshman Year, he portrays Alex, a lonely college student struggling with relationships and a lack of a quote-on-quote healthy social life. In Cha Cha Real Smooth, Andrew is on the different side of the same coin. Raiff has a knack for these kinds of characters, but it would be nice to see him switch it up more in the future. While these two characters’ struggles are uniquely different based on what they have lived through, as well as how their stories are told, Andrew simply is more forgettable. By the end of the movie, that is it all can be summed up as forgettable. That does not make it a bad film at all. It does its job as best as it can and does provide moments of drama, comedy, and splashes of conceptual romance. In the end, it will hit home with the right audience.
Cha Cha Real Smooth will be available to stream on AppleTV+ and in select theaters as of June 17, 2022.