Inside Toronto director Chandler Levack’s ‘Mile End Kicks’ premiere, Canada Reviews

Early in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, Creem magazine founder Lester Bangs — played by the ever-magnificent Philip Seymour Hoffman — warns Crowe’s stand-in, William, about the perks of music journalism as though they are temptations sent from the Devil himself: “The publicists! The bands! You got on an honest face, they’re gonna tell you everything. But you CANNOT [the capitalization Crowe’s own] make friends with the rockstars. And they’ll buy you drinks, you’ll meet girls . . . they’ll try to fly you places for free . . . offer you drugs.” This monologue acts as a premonition for the rest of the film: on tour with the band Stillwater, people do tell William everything, he does meet girls, he does travel for free — albeit by bus — and he does get offered so many drugs.

Bangs’ advice rattled around in my brain as my plane took off from Billy Bishop Airport on my way to Montreal for the premiere of Chandler Levack’s sophomore feature, Mile End Kicks. Had Grace (Barbie Ferreira), Mile End Kicks’ music journalist protagonist, heeded Bangs’ advice, there wouldn’t be a movie at all, but really, there’s no way Grace would take anyone’s suggestions of how she should live her life to heart. In the summer of 2011, Grace moves to Montreal, the nexus of the indie music scene, where musicians like Grimes and Mac DeMarco first thrived, to write a book about Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill, and she quickly falls into a lopsided love triangle with two guys in the same band, lead singer Chevy (Stanley Simons) and Archie (Devon Bostick). Grace’s single-minded search for experience — she will write her book, she will learn French, she will have actual sex, she asserts in a Notes app list on her phone — is what makes her so real. Who among us, at 22, is ready to accept their own ignorance rather than race towards life itself? Mile End Kicks captures the spirit of 2011, but also that distinct feeling of when your own personal limitations butts up against the supposed freedom of adulthood. 

Levack wrote Mile End Kicks before she even conceived of her debut feature film, I Like Movies, an affecting story about a lonely and troubled high school senior who starts working at his local video rental store. Like Grace, Levack was a music and film journalist and spent a stint in Montreal, an experience she drew on for her latest film.

Having a film under her belt when she began working on Mile End Kicks helped Levack in more ways than one. “If I had made this film at 27, when I was supposed to originally, I don’t think I would have had not only the technical know-how to do it, but also the maturity and the distance,” she says. 

Though both I Like Movies and Mile End Kicks pull from Levack’s own life — ”with a lot of fictional changes and artistic licence,” Levack notes — Mile End Kicks is told from a distinctly feminine perspective, which was perhaps “closer to the bone.” Isaiah Lehtinen portrays Lawrence, the protagonist of I Like Movies with formidable talent; having a male stand-in allowed Levack to “buy into the fictional reality” of the film. This was harder to accomplish while directing Ferreira, who delivers a truly incandescent performance, as the production design imitated life almost too well.

“It was sometimes a bit trippy to see her acting things out and styled in the way I used to wear my clothes and acting out these situations that are super personal,” Levack recalls. “It was very surreal sometimes.”

Over the course of her summer in Montreal, Grace fails over and over again, with boys, with her writing, with friends, with French, but Levack never plays these moments out as though she is punishing Grace for wanting too much. “What I’m trying to do with the movie is at least give the character some dignity. I don’t want it to be this exploitative thing. She’s the heroine of the movie and you want her to learn those lessons, but she has to fall really, really deep,” Levack says. “She has to be immobilized on her floor in her American Apparel disco shorts, her stockings all ripped, with a seven-day-old poutine on her bed. Only then can she learn the lesson and gain the power of self-respect.”

Levack credits Ferreira’s performance to the actor’s natural charisma and confidence, but also to Ferreira’s approach to the character, treating Grace without condescension.

“Sometimes you feel the actor is self-conscious about having to play someone who is difficult or quirky, or they’re scared to really go there and commit themselves, so it almost feels like they’re fighting against the character. But you can just see her heart shining from inside-out in this movie.”

Levack populates her films with deeply flawed individuals, yet her directorial sensibility leans towards empathy, so that what could be grating in the hands of another director actually endears us; there’s sincere understanding. “I just don’t think that well-adjusted, bland, likeable people deserve to be in a movie,” Levack says about her characters.

Levack lived in Montreal again for the first time in over a decade for the duration of pre-production and the shoot, going so far as taking a Megabus from Toronto to mark the occasion. As we neared Théâtre Outremont, we passed a number of shooting locations. Levack pointed out the Sir George-Étienne Cartier Monument at the base of Mont Royal.

“I can’t tell you how many times I went over to that statue completely emo, drinking a beer, or smoking a cigarette even though I don’t really smoke,” Levack says. “I’m a painfully nostalgic person. All these places in Montreal, they just mean so much to me, so to get to reclaim them or memorialize them and commit them to celluloid is such a gift.”

As much as Mile End Kicks is a Montreal movie, it is hard to separate it from Toronto, the place Grace is so desperate to escape from and where Levack lived for nearly 15 years.

“If you really love something intensely, there’s going to be a period of life where you start to resent it. I don’t want this movie to be a hate letter to Toronto or anything,” Levack says.

Grace’s reasons for escaping are as much about her need for independence as they are financial. While working at SPIN Magazine, she’s still living at her parents’ house in Burlington, commuting into the city for gigs and long nights at the office. Montreal offers a respite, its cheap rent attracting artists from all over the country. It’s hard to fault Grace for leaving — I, too, tried to run away from my problems at that age, decamping to Vancouver and experiencing similar failures — especially since inflation and broader cultural shifts have only exacerbated the economic issues plaguing the city.

“It’s never been harder to live in Toronto, especially if you’re aspiring to be an artist. The rent is impossible, and a lot of the forces that are making Toronto more gentrified and corporate every day are squeezing out the same kind of DIY art spaces where I was really lucky to get to thrive in,” Levack says. “They’re all dying.”

After filming Mile End Kicks, Levack moved to Los Angeles to direct Roommates, a Happy Madison (the production company started by Adam Sandler) production that coincidentally released on the same day as Mile End Kicks. Leaving Toronto this time around, after living in the same apartment for 13 years, struck Levack as strange, though she doesn’t see the move as permanent.

Levack found that, as the only Canadian surrounded by Americans, many teased her about Canadian culture — and though she knew their jokes were made out of love, she recognized their superficial understanding as a lack of curiosity.“That’s what is powerful about making films in Burlington and Montreal; you can create this little snapshot of what your experience was like and maybe Americans will watch it and maybe they’ll be curious about it.” she says. “I don’t want to make films where I’m trying to make them for Americans to identify with. I want to make stuff that’s really specific to my own experiences. All of those little details make something more universal.”

Before the screening, bodies crammed inside the lobby of Théâtre Outremont, craning their necks at the stars and waiting impatiently for drinks at the bar. Milling about, equipped with a disposable camera, I was grateful to be dressed all in black — This Is Lorelei T-shirt, Holt Renfrew private label tuxedo blazer, mini-skirt from The Row and black platform Ashe boots, adhering to the indie sleaze dress code as best I could — so that no one could see the growing sweat stains under my arms. Wielding a camera knocks away any sense of insecurity, which, along with being at an event in journalistic capacity, makes it easy to approach strangers: Can I snap a picture? Why are you here? How’s my French? 

After I paced past the same faces a few too many times, I retreated to the bottom of the marble staircase leading to the mezzanine, scrolling on my phone not unlike Grace at the first loft party she attends in Montreal, except in my case there were no Devon Bostick lookalikes coming to swoop in to my rescue with a weed pen. Well, there was a Devon Bostick lookalike: it was Devon Bostick himself, but he was busy gamely answering questions into tiny mics in the room I’d just leapt from. Elsewhere in the room was Juliette Gariépy, who plays Grace’s roommate Madeleine; my biggest regret of the night was not being able to gush at her about how much I loved her in Red Rooms, Pascal Plante’s underseen and unnerving 2023 film. 

Théâtre Outremont seats 775 people, and the crowd at the door, from my vantage point, appeared to be spawning endlessly — I was told later that the line led far down the block outside. 

The crowd at the door appeared endless, like spawning zombies: “Everyone and their f**king mum is here. All of Montreal Gen Z is here,” one young woman hissed to her friend as they stomped past me to their seats upstairs, the anxiety and annoyance of potentially running into people you’d otherwise avoid dense in her voice. 

After a quick dinner across the street during the screening, we were whisked away to the after party held in a loft not so dissimilar to the ones in the film. Though the night was crisp, you wouldn’t know it standing on the rooftop deck, everyone pressed up together chatting eagerly and blasting one cig after another. Rarely had I been dropped into a setting knowing so few people and found it so easy to move through a room. It was like a good house party, where I could flit between new acquaintances without feeling like I was running away from one embarrassing moment to the next. Maybe this is maturity? Maybe this is liking yourself? Regardless, I find myself getting too psychoanalytical, too introspective. I ambled home eventually, having chugged a few beers and made some new friends. The next day I woke up in my pitch black hotel room, my hair reeking with the stale stench of cigarettes. I was unclean and stinky, but somehow felt accomplished.

I’d adhered to Lester Bangs’ advice to William in Almost Famous: I didn’t make friends with the rockstars, though I accepted the free drinks and the food and the flight, met the girls (and boys) and was offered drugs. Towards the end of the movie, Lester tells William, “Great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love…”

Without declaring something great art too soon, I can tell you that Mile End Kicks, at least, has all those things.