Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022)
A brash, not quite go-getter cranks up parties and his personal charm
Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022)
In theaters and streaming on Apple TV+
Cooper Raiff is Andrew and Dakota Johnson is Domino in Cha Cha Real Smooth
This isn’t exactly a coming-of-age story. It’s more of an I’m-almost-grown-can-you-give-me-a-minute story. It honors, even insists upon, delayed self-discovery. It seems the world can’t avoid badgering its reclusive souls, warning them: It’s time you grew up and faced facts. And they can’t help but respond: Not yet, not so fast. That quivering refusal is where the movie finds its voice.
For 22-year-old Andrew (Cooper Raiff, who also wrote and directed), most major areas of life haven’t clicked yet. He’s recently graduated from Tulane, but can’t settle on a career path, so he lives at home in New Jersey with his adoring mother (Leslie Mann), skeptical stepdad (Brad Garrett) and just-entering-puberty brother, David (Evan Assante).
Andrew and David are both struggling to inch forward. Andrew can’t yet afford to move out of the house and David is still, with Andrew’s patient guidance, working up the nerve to land his first kiss with a girl. Without much else to do, the brothers attend a bat mitzvah, and a bored, mischievous Andrew decides just for the heck of it to become the life of the party. He gets reluctant guests onto the dance floor, shaking their groove things. Especially tough to get on her feet is Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), who suffers from autism and, almost inevitably, is also crippled by a painful shyness.
Lola’s protective mother Domino (Dakota Johnson) isn’t about to push Lola out of her (dis)comfort zone. In a way, it’s a companion piece to her own. She coolly informs Andrew that she, too, wants to sit quietly as the party springs to life around her. Domino is still reeling from being abandoned by an uncaring husband (Lola’s father). Both she and Lola are tamping down anger and regret.
Andrew has no way of knowing that he’ll soon enter and challenge both their lives, barging into their muteness and immobility. He’ll also get his own jolt forward, but not before punches have been thrown and real blood, the red stuff of life, has spilled in surprise.
The unmoored young man grinds away at Meat Sticks, a fast-food joint, so his life gets a nice bump when he starts billing himself as a “party starter”, the guy who gets people moving at staid get-togethers. He lands gigs at bar and bat mitzvahs and before long turns his success into a small business.
It doesn’t bring in enough cash for him to quit his dead-end job, but it keeps him visible in the community and also allows him to continue to run into Domino and Lola. Domino informs him that she can’t always be at home for Lola, and since the girl now likes and trusts Andrew, the mother hires him as a part-time companion to Lola. He also becomes a good listener to the beautiful, equally lonely Domino, who’s less than ardently engaged to be married.
Cooper Raiff as Andrew and Evan Assante as David in Cha Cha Real Smooth
The smart writing trick Raiff pulls off here is not to center on one sad sack, Andrew, but to spread the jitters among a small tight set of the forlorn. His script keeps not one but a handful of lives on hold, so no one is pitied too much or, just as important, mired in crushing misery. We can tell that tragedy isn’t looming here, that somehow these people are going to cope.
When it comes to being an emotional scaredy cat, the movie sweetly suggests that it takes one to know one. Nobody is let off the hook, but no one is held up to ridicule or harshly put down. This boundless gentleness drives the action and makes the movie’s climax all the more moving for not being particularly earth-shaking. Booty-shaking, we learn, can help beat back the blues.
This is the 25-year-old Raiff’s second feature. His assured, small-scale direction pours on feelings, without shamelessly wearing its heart on its sleeve. Cristal Dunlap did the sometimes moody, other times bright, consistently unsentimental cinematography. The compositions aren’t overly formal, there’s little soft-focus, and no golden lighting. Scenes don’t drip or curdle with emotion. The spillovers of fear and sorrow are compact, unforeseen shocks of recognition, not overstressed by the director or the actors.
Raiff most excels in his casting. Dakota Johnson is sad, wistful yet somehow tough as nails under all of Domino’s trembling like a leaf. Vanessa Burghardt keeps Lola almost willfully fragile yet gives her a no-nonsense understanding of her frailty. We can see her concealing a strength that’s slowly coming into its own. Mann as Andrew’s mother and Assante as David supply a rough-and-ready love for Andrew. They keep faith with him even when he’s most exasperating.
The crucial coup is Raiff’s casting of himself as Andrew. He wears Andrew easily, and it feels like he’s drawing on his own prickly personality to reveal Andrew’s. The fit is seamless, and his work didn’t strike me as vain or self-serving. Watching Raiff, I sensed his acting would be just as open and meticulous in another movie written and directed by someone else.
When Andrew tries to goad other people, he ends up pulling the rug out from under himself, too. Raiff keeps Andrew's freshness, that brashness that hasn't quite matured but refuses to be denied, front and center, uncompromised. By the end, both Andrew’s future and his creator’s gifts positively radiate from the screen.