C’mon C’mon Review: Mike Mills’s Self-Effacing Look at a Family in Flux

Writer-director Mike Mills is a scavenger of often pithy moments that distill an incident, conversation, or life-changing event to its emotional essence. With a penchant for jump cuts, cross-cutting, and musical montages, his films might be described as fragmentary if not for their unifying spirit of psychological inquiry. Their every moment is carefully curated to express both the fundamental qualities of his characters as well as their mutability. There’s something of Terrence Malick in Mills’s approach, particularly in his preference for direct emotional communication over narrativization. But if Malick is on a perpetual quest for the sublime, Mills is more prosaically, if no less profoundly, in search of answers to the question of how we get through this thing called life.

One answer to that query is provided by Jesse (Woody Norman), the intelligent and turbulent child at the center of C’mon C’mon, in a statement that lends the film its title: “You just have to come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.” Mills’s film explores the triangular relationship among Jesse, his unmarried and childless radio journalist uncle, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), and Jesse’s put-upon mother, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann). Johnny travels to Los Angeles to take care of Jesse when Viv is called away to Oakland to attend to her ex-husband—and Jesse’s father—Paul (Scoot McNairy) as he undergoes one of his periodic mental health crises. As Paul’s episode drags on, Jesse and his uncle will head back to Johnny’s home in Manhattan and later to New Orleans, where Johnny is sent on assignment to interview kids about the future.

Scenes of these kids being interviewed are threaded throughout the film—as well as the closing credits—and they act as something of a Greek chorus commenting on the themes embedded in the film’s granular interpersonal drama. However, in typical Mills fashion, these kids don’t provide a single unified message, but a mosaic of differing impressions, fears, hopes, and dreams—a multiplicity of voices that matches the film’s ever-shifting urban backdrops.

The scenery changes as Johnny and Jesse bound around the country, but C’mon C’mon remains largely fixated on how Johnny navigates the familiar trials of child-rearing: managing Jesse’s screen time, finding him food that he’ll actually eat (no raisins!), and dealing with his often-impulsive behavior. The two share an easy rapport as they wrestle with each other, play around with Johnny’s radio equipment, enjoy bedtime stories, and share goofy conversations.

The film’s deepest pleasures come from the complex, deeply naturalistic interplay between Phoenix and Norman. Phoenix, with his paunchy build and lumbering gait, is less affected than he’s ever been, coming off more like a Mark Ruffalo-esque average joe than the tortured loner of Todd Phillips’s Joker and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, while Norman strikes a perfect balance between the endearingly precocious and the irritatingly quirky.

As the uncle and nephew’s bond blossoms in each other’s presence, their individual relationships to Viv transform in her absence. Johnny and Viv, who grew apart in the wake of their mother’s (Deborah Strang) death, now share long conversations over the phone in which they discuss their shared difficulties in figuring out how to deal with Jesse, while Jesse himself, existing in this strange limbo state with his uncle, struggles with complicated feelings about his mother and father, his loneliness, and his inability to relate to other kids his age.

Mills is practically allergic to melodrama, which is simultaneously one of C’mon C’mon’s greatest assets and the fundamental reason it doesn’t quite hang together. It’s easy to admire Mills’s unwillingness to introduce phony plot complications or indulge in heartstring-tugging pathos (though there are few moments that might elicit a tear or two), but the film also suffers from a certain shapelessness. Often it feels less like a work of narrative fiction than a never-ending therapy session in which the minutest details of everyday life are picked over for some insight into human psychology. This provides plenty of opportunity to explore the complex dynamics of Johnny and Jesse’s family, but it can also be taxing.

C’Mon C’Mon’s black-and-white cinematography doesn’t help, enveloping the proceedings in a lusterless, claustrophobic atmosphere that feels at odds with the effect that the events of the film are having on Jesse. Outside of some attractively photographed cityscapes, each of the five cities in the film ends up looking pretty much like the last one—drab, gray, and not much fun.

In a scene near the end of the film, the audience learns that one of Jesse’s greatest fears is that as he grows older, he won’t remember this adventure with his uncle. Clearly this is a life-altering time in the boy’s life, a break from the alienating mundanities of his everyday existence, and as such something that he wants to cherish forever. And yet, in Mills’s hands, this adventure too often feels stagnantly rendered. Caring for an emotionally fragile young boy is certainly no easy task, but surely it doesn’t have to feel so spiritless.