Movie blog — Mile End Kicks (2025): love, music and finding your voice in Montreal’s indie glow.
Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks is a film that smells like cigarettes in a loft, sticky beer on a basement floor and the late-night adrenaline of a band on the verge. A romantic comedy and coming-of-age love letter to Montreal’s indie music scene, it pairs pop-culture specificity (Alanis, mixtapes, basement shows) with universal questions about who we’re allowed to become when we’re finally out on our own. It isn’t tidy — it’s messy, loud, occasionally exasperating — and that’s exactly the point. This film wants to feel like a city in motion, not a plot diagram.
Below I break down the cast and who carries the movie, explain how the film’s commercial life looks so far, situate its niche and tone, and give a detailed, spoiler-friendly deep dive into what the film does well and where it trips.
Quick facts (the things you’ll want to quote)
Director / Writer: Chandler Levack.
Star: Barbie Ferreira (as Grace Pine).
Premiere / Festivals: World premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) — Special Presentations, September 4, 2025; also played Whistler and other Canadian festivals.
Runtime: ~110–111 minutes.
Tone / Genre: Indie romantic comedy / coming-of-age with a music-scene backdrop.
Notable music contribution: Contemporary Montreal band TOPS contributed original songs to the soundtrack.
How many cast — and who really carries the picture?
The film uses a compact, ensemble approach anchored by a clear protagonist. The primary cast credited across publicity and festival listings includes roughly 10–15 named performers with narrative weight — the leads and the key supporting players. Principal names you’ll see are:
- Barbie Ferreira as Grace Pine (the protagonist).
- Devon Bostick as Archi / Archie (lead guitarist type).
- Stanley (Stan) Simons (credited as Stanley Simons) as Chevy (lead singer).
- Juliette Gariépy, Robert Naylor, Emily Lê, Hasani Freeman, Magi Merlin, Isaiah Lehtinen, and a cameo from Jay Baruchel among others rounding out the Mile End crowd.
If you want a precise number: count the names in the official cast list and festival pages and you’ll land in that 10–15 range for the performers who matter to the story. (There are also a lot of smaller faces — band members, crowds, bartenders — who make the world feel lived in.).
Who carries the movie? Hands down: Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira) is the means character — the emotional and narrative center. We follow Grace’s decisions, anxieties and growth. She’s the audience’s POV into Mile End: she’s the newcomer, the critic trying to find her voice, and the romantic who falls in the middle of a delicate and sometimes self-destructive band dynamic. Ferreira’s charisma and emotional intelligence are the film’s compass; the rest of the ensemble orbits her arc. Multiple reviews singled Ferreira out as the film’s biggest asset.
Box collection & commercial life — festival darling, limited theatrical hopes.
At festival time (TIFF and follow-ups) the film’s commercial life was still settling. That’s standard for a film of this kind: festival premiere → sales conversations → selective theatrical release or streaming acquisition. Early distribution news shows a positive trajectory: Sumerian Pictures picked up North American rights for a U.S. nationwide theatrical rollout after the festival run, and other regional sales/distribution deals were reported. That indicates the film will get at least a modest theatrical window rather than going straight to streaming.
Concrete box-office numbers are not yet a headline: Mile End Kicks is — for now — a festival/arthouse property built to perform on word of mouth, music-scene nostalgia and star power (Ferreira). Expect modest theatrical grosses (typical for indie rom-coms) but a longer life on streaming, playlists and soundtrack streams. The film’s commercial success will likely be judged more by critical buzz and cultural resonance than by blockbuster receipts.
The niche — who this movie is made for.
Mile End Kicks lives in the sweet spot where music journalism, north-American indie nostalgia and millennial dating tropes overlap. It’s for:
- People who love music scenes and the small rituals around them (mixtapes, zines, basement shows).
- Viewers who prefer character-first rom-coms that get messy rather than tidy romcom formulas.
- Fans of Barbie Ferreira and indie music cinema (think Control, Hedwig, indie festival work).
- Anyone curious about the particular magic of Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood circa 2011 — that half-sincere, half-ironic creative energy that fuels the plot.
Put plainly: it’s a rom-com for culture-workers, critics and people who once dated a musician. If you want high-concept polish, look elsewhere; if you want specificity, textures and music in the bloodstream, this is for you.
Story & detailed analysis.
Premise & setup
Set in summer 2011, Mile End Kicks follows Grace Pine, a 22-year-old music critic who relocates to Montreal to write a book about a specific cultural artifact (Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill) — which already tells you the film is being sly about nostalgia. Instead of that tidy project, Grace is lured into the orbit of Bone Patrol, an indie band that feels both promising and self-sabotaging. She becomes the band’s publicist and finds herself romantically entangled with Archi (Devon Bostick) and Chevy (Stanley Simons). That triangle sits at the heart of the movie: career vs devotion, taste vs complicity, love vs extraction.
Act structure & the emotional logic
- Act I — Arrival and enchantment: Grace arrives in Mile End, meets the band at a loft party, and is seduced by the music world’s promise — access, authenticity, and the possibility of being seen. Levack stages these scenes as a rush: live footage, phones, overlapping songs, emails, and the dizzying intimacy of small venues. The director writes with an insider’s eye; you feel how writing about music can feel both like worship and like theft.
- Act II — The triangle and compromises: As Grace invests in the band, she blurs professional lines. Her reviews and publicity begin to influence who gets heard. The romance — more tender with Archie, more combustible with Chevy — complicates her ethics. Scenes here interrogate sexism, cash shortages, and how a critic becomes complicit in the culture she critiques. This is where the film’s thematic heart is: the blurry moral ground between fandom and authorship. Critics noted that Levack is most interesting when the film leans into moral ambivalence.
- Act III — Consequences and claims: The ending pulls together the personal and professional consequences: who gets credit, who gets hurt, who grows up. Levack resists tidy closure; she gives Grace a choice that exposes her core values. The film’s emotional payoff is earned through small scenes — a song, a fight, a missed opportunity — rather than a cinematic deus ex machina.
Themes (packaged)
- Taste as power. The movie is always asking: who gets to define what’s good? Grace’s role as critic/publicist makes her both gatekeeper and instigator, and the film treats that ambivalence without easy judgment.
- Sex, consent and creative labor. Romance with artists is romantic in movies; here it’s messy and ethically complicated because money, careers and ego are all in the room. Levack uses the romantic triangle to show how people can be both tender and exploitative.
- Artistic survival vs authenticity. The band wants irreverence but also wants to eat; Grace wants integrity but also needs a life. That tension fuels most of the film’s conflict.
- Community as scene. Mile End itself functions as character: the cafés, the lofts, the radio stations, the vinyl shops — they’re not background, they shape choices.
Style & music
Levack stages performances with raw immediacy: handheld shots, jumpcuts, sweaty closeups at shows. The soundtrack (including original songs by TOPS and live snippets of Islands) is crucial — the film’s best moments are when music and image sync and you feel why people risk everything for a song. Reviewers praised the soundtrack and Ferreira’s scene-by-scene charisma.
What works — and what may divide viewers.
What works
- Barbie Ferreira’s lead turn. Multiple critics singled her out as a star-making performance — vulnerable, funny and sharply empathetic.
- Music authenticity. The film nails the small rituals of a music scene: flyers, bad merch, backstage compromises. If you’ve been in a band, you’ll wince and laugh in equal measure.
- Ambition with heart. Levack attempts a rom-com that also asks serious questions about value and labor; that balancing act is brave and often succeeds.
What may trip people up
- Pacing & loose edges. Some reviewers think the film loses steam toward the end, stretching beyond its best scenes. That’s a fair critique: the film’s loose structure sometimes feels like a playlist that’s a bit too long.
- Niche references. If you don’t care about indie rock or the particular cultural references, the film’s charms may be thinner.
- Moral ambivalence as frustration. The movie rarely hands out moral clarity; some viewers crave that payoff and will leave wanting firmer answers.
Final verdict — who should see it and why.
Mile End Kicks is a vivid, messy, often delightful film for anyone who remembers falling in love with a song and feeling like the world just might be rearranged by it. It’s also a thoughtful look at the contradictions of cultural work: how we monetize art, how we write about it, and how personal ties tangle the professional. If you like your rom-coms smart, slightly irreverent and split-screened with mixtape aesthetics, this is one to catch in theaters or the first streaming window.
If you want a perfectly calibrated rom-com, this isn’t it. But if you want a film that sounds like a neighborhood and reads like a mixtape, Mile End Kicks keeps the good songs rolling.
