C'mon C'mon
2021 · Mike Mills
Johnny and his young nephew forge a tenuous but transformational relationship when they embark on a cross-country trip to see life away from Los Angeles.
dir. Mike Mills · 2021
Mike Mills built Beginners from his father and 20th Century Women from his mother; this one he built from becoming a parent himself. Joaquin Phoenix, in his gentlest register since Her, plays a radio journalist crisscrossing America to interview children about the future, suddenly saddled with his nine-year-old nephew — a startling, unmannered Woody Norman. Robbie Ryan shoots Los Angeles, New York, and New Orleans in a silvery black-and-white that turns ordinary streets into something remembered rather than observed, and Mills threads in his signature device: passages read aloud from real books, here on motherhood and listening. The film's quiet radicalism is its refusal of manufactured crisis — the drama is simply the labor of caring for a child, hour by hour, and admitting how badly adults do it. Its emotional ballast comes from the interviews themselves, which are unscripted: actual kids in actual cities, telling a fiction film the truth.
Lines of influence
- Paper Moon (1973) — The template Mills revives: a rootless, ill-equipped adult paired on an episodic black-and-white road trip with a preternaturally articulate child who out-talks him.
- Alice in the Cities (1974) — A reluctant adult guardian ferries a sharp young girl across a shifting geography in observational monochrome, with drama dissolved into wandering, undramatic transit.
- The 400 Blows (1959) — The child interviewed in near-documentary direct address (the psychologist scene) — real, unscripted-feeling testimony punched into fiction, the device Mills turns into his kid-interview interludes.
- Manhattan (1979) — Gordon Willis's precedent for photographing a contemporary American metropolis as luminous, architectural black-and-white space rather than as period pastiche.
- Reds (1981) — Non-actor 'witness' interviews shot documentary-style and inter-cut with the fiction — the structural braid of real testimony and staged story that Mills adopts with actual children.
- Beginners (2010) — First panel of Mills's autobiographical trilogy, establishing the essayistic interleaving of personal history, quotation, and archival montage into intimate drama.
- 20th Century Women (2016) — Directly seeds C'mon C'mon's method: literary quotation read aloud over voiceover, braided ensemble intimacy, and a deliberate refusal of a single climactic crisis.
- Fish Tank (2009) — Robbie Ryan's collaborator method — available-light, handheld, actor-following naturalism — here honed on a volatile youth, the intimacy Mills reroutes into composed black-and-white.
- American Honey (2016) — Robbie Ryan again: an immersive, observational road movie built from handheld proximity to young non-professionals rather than plot beats.
- Boyhood (2014) — Childhood rendered as an accretion of small ordinary moments with the dramatic crisis deliberately withheld — the same refusal-of-crisis observational rhythm.
- Frances Ha (2012) — Contemporary, literate American life shot in crisp digital black-and-white as an aesthetic choice for the present tense, not nostalgia.
- The Florida Project (2017) — A child's performance coaxed from documentary-style observation and improvisation, the camera held at and trusting of the kid's-eye register.
- The Kid with a Bike (2011) — Naturalist, unsentimental child performance opposite an adult reluctantly pulled into caretaking, emotion carried by behavior rather than scored catharsis.
- Close-Up (1990) — The porous border between documentary and fiction — real people playing near-versions of themselves — that legitimizes Mills mixing actual interviewed children with a scripted story.
- Aftersun (2022) — Extends the adult–child dyad and refusal of crisis into memory, with a recording device (camcorder) foregrounding listening and the act of capturing a child's voice.
- Petite Maman (2021) — Child interiority taken utterly seriously through patient, low-to-the-ground observation and attentive listening, plot pared to near nothing.