Movie Review : Mile End Kicks (2026)
I was never the one to feel any nationalist pride, but I do love Montreal. It's not perfect, but it has its moment. One of them was the birth of its own, objectively important indie music scene at the turn of the millenium. Montreal music was a thing for a couple of years. Young musicians moved here to kickstart their career. The city was their bohemian Hollywood. Mile End Kicks is, I believe, the first ever movie about this moment and it captures quite well why it was both tragic and hilarious at the same time.
Mile End Kicks tells the story of Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira), a young and talented music critic who decides to spend the summer in Montreal to write a 33 1/3 book about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. No connection between the two, she just wants to be part of the movement, live somewhere inspiring, etc. She moves in with Madeleine (Juliette Gariépy) and starts a series of poor life decisions that were very emblematic of how things were and what kids wanted in the Mile End then.
Deconstructing a Creative Utopia
Here's an uncomfortable truth about Mile End kids: they took themselves quite seriously. That doesn’t make them unique, but what made Montreal indie historically important is the same reason why it seems a little goofy today: it was a transition period between the raw-boned honesty of the nineties and the more self-aware, social media driven mythmaking that is still going on now. Artists were torn between who they wanted to be and who they thought they should be to become successful.
This contradiction is best explored through the character of scumbag vocalist Chevy Olsen (Stanley Simons) whom (of course) Grace hopelessly falls in love with. Because "being a scumbag is his public persona" and showing interest in him only demonstrates that you’re smarter and more complex than everybody else. That’s how these people thought back then. Not only Chevy is an undeniable scumbag, but he's also emotionally illiterate and paralyzed by his own convoluted self-awareness. He's perfect.
Mile End Kicks understands the existential theme park that the Montreal indie scene was in the early 00s. Its utopian character. Montreal was the place where you congregated to become more than you were meant to be somewhere else, but that romantic vision was irremediably at odds with anything that didn't directly stem from it. If you were a lost kid from Edmonton traveling to Montreal to be a rock star, you either became a hollow parody of what you believe was cool or just remained yourself.
The people made the place, the place never made the people and if you moved into town with no self of who you are and hoping for an epiphany, you’d end up heartbroken. As funny as it gets sometimes, Mile End Kicks nails this complex cultural heartbreak.
Kickstarting This Juliette Gariépy Conversation
Some of you might remember Juliette Gariépy for her haunting and sophisticated performance in 2023's Red Rooms. She's once again the best thing on screen in Mile End Kicks (except maybe for the uproaring Simons), but she's used in an unconventional manner by writer and director Chandler Levack. Her character Madeleine mirrors the spirit of Montreal: kind, beautiful, mysterious, creative, but also street smart and sincere because she lives here. She's not inside someone's romantic fantasy, she lives there.
Madeleine is nowhere near a main character, but the way she drifts in and out of Grace's story as she's combining catastrophic life decisions provide a moral beacon. Their relationship is indicative of the boundary between Grace’s romantic vision of Montreal and reality. Gariépy interprets Madeleine with a mix of youthful exuberence and self-aware restraint that makes her an undeniably charming and sincere friend for Grace. Her presence provides Grace with a framework to mature.
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I’m aware this review is pretty cerebral, but Mile End Kicks is a romantic comedy at heart. It remains funny and soulful while negotiating the nuances of a time and place people either care too much about or care too much about telling everyone it was the worst thing in the world. Eventually everybody moved on with their lives, drifted in and out of music and whatnot. That’s why we can remember it nowadays and Mile End Kicks remembers the indie utopia years for what it was.
7.6/10
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