C'mon C'mon (2021)

Mike Mills returns with another tender excavation of family, rendered in black and white and scored to the Dessner brothers' patient hum. Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a radio journalist who records American children talking about their futures, then inherits his nine-year-old nephew Jesse for a cross-country stretch. The interview interludes use real kids, not actors, and the result is a genuinely varied cross-section of young voices. That variety arrives naturally, a byproduct of the documentary conceit and not a casting directive. The film is content to let its people simply exist.

The emotional engine is Paul, Jesse's father, whose bipolar disorder drives the plot and the family's fractures. Mills treats the condition with sobriety, showing an illness that requires treatment and patience, and he lets Johnny model a healthier way to sit with feeling. Gaby Hoffmann's Viv carries the weight of a marriage in freefall and a brother who never showed up when it mattered. Her interior life is given room. This is a humanist family drama, though, not a thesis. Race and queerness go unremarked, and the film has no interest in either as subject matter.

Where the picture drifts toward instruction, it does so softly. The children's musings about the world they will inherit brush against anxiety without ever naming a cause. Johnny's arc, in which he learns to validate a child's anger instead of suppressing it, plays as gentle counsel on emotional literacy. Nothing here hectors. Nothing here argues economics, or bodies, or history. It is a small, kind film about listening, and it would prefer we do the same.