You don’t have to be familiar with America’s Bar Mitzvah party industry to know the moves to its dancefloor staple ‘Cha Cha Slide’. You slide to the left, then the right, do a criss-cross with your feet, and the rest goes from there. The same can be said for the film that references that song’s lyrics, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Cooper Raiff’s Sundance-winning sophomore indie, which he also wrote and stars in. Bat and Bar Mitzvahs frequently provide the film’s stage — think kippahs, cake, and throngs of awkward 12-year-olds shuffling along to trap music — but at its heart, the film is a character study of an aimless yet affable young man coasting, The Graduate-style, through post-academic life.
The film in many ways shares connective tissue with Raiff’s debut film Freshman Year (titled Shithouse in the US), a sometimes bracingly honest account of shy student Alex (played by Raiff) navigating clumsily through the social requirements of college life. Like Alex, Raiff’s character here, Andrew, always articulates his feelings astutely, which contributes to some of the film’s more tender moments — particularly between Dakota Johnson’s character Domino; her teenage daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), who has been held back in school on account of her autism; and Andrew’s bipolar mother, played with seasoned maternal warmth by Leslie Mann.
Each of Raiff's characters > are sympathetic and redeemable, even when they make poor decisions.
Domino and Andrew connect via a series of long glances over the cloth-covered tables at the Bar Mitzvah of one of Lola’s classmates (Andrew has tagged along with his kid brother). Her relative youth and ability to wear clothes very well have branded Domino an outcast among the other mothers of the community, but her bond with Lola and need to give her as conventional an adolescence as possible drives her to these functions regularly. Andrew’s ability to win over Lola, whose autism manifests in a need for strict rules and boundaries, hails the start of a complicated but well-meaning relationship with both.
Johnson — a consistently enigmatic and beguiling screen presence — collaborated with Raiff on her character, who suffers from depressive feelings, only drawing Andrew further into her orbit. As a result, her dialogue feels more nuanced and lived-in, as a woman a decade older than Andrew’s 22-year-old. Raiff, who is 25, imbues the surrounding script with unbridled earnestness. Each of his characters are sympathetic and redeemable, even when they make poor decisions. It’s a quality that at times overpowers the film; though rooted in a suburban community consisting of people with real-life issues, Raiff’s palpable love for the characters that he’s created romanticises them to the point where they feel at odds with the world that he’s created for them.
Yet this is still an impressively observant film, and its devout lack of cynicism renders Cha Cha Real Smooth a tonic, brimming with messy, backable characters and ending on an affectionate and hopeful note. Cynics may bristle at Raiff’s optimistic intentions, but this is a film named after a hopelessly cheesy dance song’s lyrics, after all.