CHERRY: 3 STARS
This is Spider-Man like you have never seen him before. “Cherry,” a new drug drama based on the novel of the same name by Nico Walker and now available on Apple TV +, features Tom Holland in his grittiest role to date.
The fresh-faced Holland is the unnamed title character, let’s call him Cherry for ease of explanation, an underachieving college freshman from an affluent family, head-over-heels for Emily (Ciara Bravo). Based on author Nico Walker, he’s a jittery collection of insecurities who finds a soul mate in Emily (Ciara Bravo), a young woman whose decision to move to Montreal to go to school sends him on a downward spiral. Impulsively, he quits school and joins the army.
Turns out Emily was bluffing, but it’s too late. They marry before he ships out, as he leaves the one good thing in his life behind for a tour in Iraq.
Woefully unprepared for the military, the death, despair and drugs take their toll, and he returns to civilian life as a hollow shell, riddled with PTSD. He finds comfort in drugs, and is soon swallowed up and spit out by Ohio’s opioid crisis. Financially drained and disenfranchised, he robs banks to support his heroin addiction, losing Emily and what was left of his self-respect.
It does not reveal a major plot point to let you know that “Cherry” was written while Walker was in jail, serving an 11-year sentence. Negotiations for the film rights actually broke down when Walker, still behind bars, ran out of prison phone minutes. He’s out now, and is apparently using the money earned from the book to pay back some of the money he stole.
But back to the film.
Directed by the Russo brothers, the dynamic duo behind a good chunk of the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- "Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “Captain America: Civil War,” “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame” -- the movie is a departure for them. Like their other films, “Cherry” is slick and stylish, but there is a darkly humorous tone that’s been absent from their best-known work. It’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the tragic events of the main character’s life palatable, but make no mistake, this isn’t a comedy. While the Russos find the funny in some very bad situations, this is a bleak film. "Sometimes I feel like I've already seen everything that's going to happen,” Holland’s character says, “and it's a nightmare."
It’s also a rather long film. At two-and-a-half hours, the film luxuriates in the ambitious set-up of the story, creating a vivid sense of the character’s search for purpose in a life that feels cut adrift. The early moments feel acutely observed, but as the movie gets grittier, the visual flair overwhelms the story, engaging the eye, but not the brain. Ideas of toxic masculinity, the destructive nature of opioids, and the nature of war are soon abandoned in favour of a more standard crime biopic approach.
Keeping us interested is Holland, who grounds the high-flying coming-of-age story with a career best performance that never loses sight of the film’s basic premise; that this is a young man, out of his depth in almost every way.
“Cherry” is ambitious and raw, but the scope of the story is too wide to be truly effective.
BOOGIE: 3 ½ STARS
“Boogie,” a new film directed by TV host, chef and author of “Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir” Eddie Huang and now playing in theatres, is a universal story of hoop dreams set within the Asian community of Queens, N.Y.
The son of Chinese immigrants, (Perry Yung and Pamelyn Chee), Alfred Chin (Taylor Takahashi) --“I prefer my stripper name,” he jokes, “Boogie” -- has dreams of playing in the NBA. He’s got game, but his family is divided. His father and uncle want him to take a big payday from an Asian team, an offer that will ruin his chance of going pro with the NBA. Mom is more academically minded. To that end, she enrolls him in a fancy prep school in hopes a scout for a college team will discover him there, smoothing his way to a scholarship.
Trouble is, Boogie is more interested in hanging out with his best friend and teammate Richie (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) and wannabe romantic interest Eleanor (Taylour Paige) than he is in studying “Catcher in the Rye.”
On the court he is a maverick, skilled, but a bit of a wild card. He’s a trash talker who doesn’t respect his teammates -- he describes them collectively as “hot trash” -- or the guidance of his coach. As a beef with rival player Monk (Bashar “Pop Smoke” Jackson) smoulders off court and on, Boogie learns important life lessons about team work, respect for himself and others, and the millstone of expectation.
One of Boogie’s teachers tells the class, “Whether you know it or not, right here, right now, you are a coming-of age-story.” And that it is, a story of finding first love, navigating the emotional ups and downs of his parent’s rocky relationship, and getting his footing as a young man entering the world. More importantly, it is also a story of representation and expectation.
We’ve seen the up-coming athlete story before, but what makes “Boogie” compelling is Huang’s handling of the material. From flipping the typical high school movie seduction scene on its head by allowing Eleanor to guide Boogie through a sexual encounter, to weaving subtextual, personality defining cultural references throughout, Huang defies expectations. Eventually, the typical sports movie template kicks in, dampening the film’s novel approach and feel, but up until then, “Boogie” is an authentic and intimate portrait of a young man entering manhood.
“Boogie” is a strong directorial debut from Huang. It’s a lively, complex film that almost transcends its sports movie roots.
JUMP, DARLING: 3 ½ STARS
“Jump, Darling,” now on VOD, is a family drama that looks at three generations through the lens of three very different characters.
Russell Hill (Thomas Duplessie) is a young Toronto man whose dreams of being an actor are put on hold while he pursues a career in drag. His longtime boyfriend Justin (Andrew Bushell) doesn’t approve. He thinks the drag shows are a variety act, beneath Russell’s talent. “He wanted to be an actor and now his fear of ambition has become bar star.” One break-up later, Russell packs up and moves to rural Prince Edward County in eastern Ontario to bunk with his sickly grandmother Margaret (Cloris Leachman).
It’s an adjustment. Margaret has dementia, his domineering mother Ene (Linda Kash) is a dark cloud -- “I barely hear from you,” she says, “and now you’re squatting with your grandmother” -- and Hannah’s Hovel is the only gay bar within a hundred clicks. Ene wants to put Margaret in a care home, a safe place where she can be cared for or fall down the stairs. Margaret doesn’t want to trade her home for “a prison,” and certainly doesn’t want to live with Ene.
To keep Margaret out of a home, and himself in one, Russell becomes the elderly woman’s primary caregiver as he navigates life in his new small town.
The feature debut of writer/director Philip J. Connell revolves around a trio of characters. Ene is given the least to do, stuck as she is, trying to manage both Margaret and Russell, but Kash brings humanity to the tightly wound character.
The stars of the show are Duplessie and Leachman in her final leading role.
As Russell, Duplessie subtly portrays the pain that brought him to this point in his life. It’s nice, charismatic work that finds an interesting duality between Russell and his drag character Fishy Falters. What could have been a fish-out-of-water story is elevated by a performance that is about courage, empathy and staying true to one’s passions.
Like Duplessie, Leachman finds the vulnerability in Margaret, creating a character who is at once frail, but driven by the strength of her convictions. It is a tremendous late-in-life performance that doesn’t rely on old tricks. Instead, Leachman allows subtlety to fuel her performance. Quiet but feisty, her facial expressions tell her story as much as the dialogue.
“Jump, Darling” features a couple of show-stopping musical numbers from Fishy Falters, but succeeds because of its focus on the family and their dynamics.
COME TRUE: 3 STARS
In “Come True,” now on VOD, Julia Sarah Stone plays Sarah, a young woman with a sleeping problem. A teen runaway, she splits her time between crashing at her friend Zoe’s (Tedra Rogers) and sleeping in the park. No matter where she lays her head, she never gets enough sleep. Terrible nightmares keep her awake, leaving her on the brink of exhaustion all the time. No amount of coffee can keep her eyes open, and she’s even started dozing off in class, earning jeers from her classmates.
Tired of waking up tired, she signs on for a month-long university sleep experiment. Not only will it provide a comfortable place to sleep every night, but she’ll also make some money acting as a guinea pig for a team of graduate students, including Jeremy (Landon Liboiron) and the mysterious Dr. Meyer (Christopher Heatherington). Outfitted with futuristic looking headgear, she settles in each night and at first, she feels more rested than before. But as the experiment goes on, the nightmares take hold, opening up a terrifying window into her psyche as she begins to wonder what the point of the science project actually is. “I think your science project is f--ing me up,” she says.
If you are someone whose worst nightmare is waking up next to someone who says, “I had the weirdest dream last night,” and proceeds to tell you all about it, “Come True” might not be your cup of Ambien. If, however, the existential horror of a mind run amok during sleep fascinates you, then seek it out.
Director Anthony Scott Burns takes an icy, voyeuristic approach to the material, staging scenes of nightmarish terror and the clinical reaction to the patient’s deepest thoughts with an aloofness that relies on atmospherics to create the film’s uneasy vibe. It is ethereally effective, particularly when coupled with Burns’ eerie composed score.
The dreamscape scares are cerebral. Imagine if David Cronenberg had directed “Nightmare on Elm Street” instead of Wes Craven and you’ll get the idea, but the film is let down by an ending that doesn’t do justice to what came before it.
