Not so long before the dawn of COVID-19, a feral, greasepainted Joaquin Phoenix paraded his way down a NYC flight of stairs and on to Oscars glory in Joker, Todd Phillips's controversial, Martin Scorsese-styled addition to the DC cinematic universe.
Phoenix returns to the silver screen in Mike Mills's outwardly modest, humanist drama C'mon C'mon, as soft-hearted radio journalist Johnny – a man touched by an unarticulated melancholy but still enough of an idealist to rove the United States interviewing young people about their visions of the future. (Watch out, Ira Glass.)
All rumpled button-ups and low-key sincerity, Johnny is a role that seems designed to neutralise any acrid taste left by Joker. From the way that he pads through hotel rooms pensively diarising into his microphone, or indeed is moved to tears while reading aloud from a children's book, he seems like the kinda guy who might find Scorsese's films 'problematic'.
An evolving family crisis finds Johnny, with the trepidation due a middle-aged bachelor, agreeing to care for his precocious nine-year-old nephew Jesse (Woody Norman, a real livewire of a newcomer) on behalf of his semi-estranged sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann, Transparent).
In the odd couple's journey from Jesse's home in Los Angeles to Johnny's downtown Manhattan apartment and on to New Orleans for his work, awkwardness and bouts of vexation give way to a deep intergenerational bond – through which the messiest aspects of their relationships with significant others are finally given some much-needed airspace. ("Why aren't you married?" Jesse wants to know, inevitably turning the tables on the professional interviewer. "Why don't you and mom act like brother and sister?")
Writer-director Mills – who made a fictionalised tribute to his father in 2010's Beginners, followed by one to his mother with 2016's 20th Century Women – was here inspired by his own grapplings with parenthood: his child with wife and fellow filmmaker and artist Miranda July was born in 2012.
And, as before, he has channelled intimations of the autobiographical into a fiction: in this regard, the filmmaker has cited as particularly inspirational Wim Wenders's bittersweet 1974 road movie Alice in the Cities, also a monochrome chronicle of a journalist saddled with a pint-sized travelling companion whose feelings and needs are often alien to his own.
Adding a vérité element to the heartfelt mix are the real interview sessions with young people, at their schools and in their homes, mostly conducted with great sensitivity by an in-character Phoenix and Radiolab senior correspondent Molly Webster, playing Johnny's colleague Roxanne.
(The unstudied nature of their responses, it must be said, has the unfortunate side effect of making Phoenix's exchanges with the young Norman, naturalistic by movieland standards, look a little studied at times.)
Like the archival imagery that punctuates both Beginners and 20th Century Women – Mills has a collagist sensibility, and is also fond of weaving in written quotations – these interview sequences work to situate a small-scale narrative within the broad sweep of a cultural moment; they are gestures beyond the story's frame to the great expanse of life beyond it.
But, much like the lesser episodes of This American Life, Johnny's radio project – and Mills's by proxy – sometimes registers as trite.
With each interviewee given the space of just a sentence or two in the film, they can do little more than offer halting generalisations. Taken collectively, these yield only vague insight into how the country's youth feel about such hefty subjects as climate change, war, and self-expression – tantamount to a sort of non-committal, speculative optimism.
The quavering, dreamlike soundscape (courtesy of The National's Aaron and Bryce Dessner) that underpins the kids' commentary does these sequences no favours.
Nor do the accompanying streetscape montages, with Robbie Ryan's greyscale cinematography bringing the film's variegated urban environments into the same bland key.
It's integral to the design of the film as part-documentary that Johnny (whatever his other insecurities) have total faith in the import of his project. The same cannot be said of Philip Winter, the journalist played by Rüdiger Vogler in Alice in the Cities, also tasked with conducting a survey of nothing less than America itself.
Philip is a frustrated writer who has resorted to documenting his cross-country journey in polaroids, hoping that the words will follow. And yet even his photos disappoint: "They never show what it is you saw," he laments.
This difference in temperament is perhaps instructive.
In Alice in the Cities, connections are founded on mutual disconnection – the German Philip is adrift in a foreign land; Alice is abandoned by her mother – and are ultimately fleeting. The film's final scene makes no promises with regards to the future of either character.
C'mon C'mon, by comparison, builds towards a neat resolution, and sees the task of caring for a child – for the future, if you will – through far dewier eyes. (Wenders may have been the most sentimental of the filmmakers marshalled under the New German Cinema label, but Mills is in a different league.)
That much I'll grant is a matter of personal taste. More off-putting, however, is a certain knowingness that permeates the film. Mills's fiction, though crafted with palpable thought and affection, feels fundamentally demonstrative rather than exploratory, and the conclusions it offers feel correspondingly foregone.
C'mon C'mon is in cinemas now.
