C’mon C’mon — Joaquin Phoenix shines as a surrogate parent

In the 1980s in which director Mike Mills came of age, the premise of his gently acute C’mon C’mon may well have interested Hollywood. The result would have been another kind of movie. The tale of a precocious nine-year-old boy at large in New York, cared for by an uncle with no prior experience in loco parentis, there would surely have been high jinks. A generation later, we do things differently. Now the studio is modish indie A24, the adult star Joaquin Phoenix, working in diligent close-up after the outsize splat of Joker. The film is a study in fine-grained understatement, knowing enough to mock its own cuteness even as it cranks the cute high.

You forget how good Phoenix can be. Here, he plays Johnny, a New Yorker criss-crossing the US making a radio programme on the thoughts of American children about their futures. (Those kids are non-professionals, seemingly speaking for real: their interviews are a sweet, sad hum through the movie.) But a longer-term claim is soon made on his attention.

In Los Angeles, his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) is spinning plates while her husband struggles with his mental health. Although half-estranged, Johnny now pitches in to help out with her scampish son Jesse (Woody Norman). At first near-strangers, each lights up around the other: all the joy of family, none of the baggage. A week of surrogate parenting follows back east. Jesse will revel in the clatter of Manhattan, Johnny experience the precise moment in which grand plans of spiritual nourishment are replaced by blind panic on losing the kid in the supermarket.

“I was so tired,” Johnny notes. “But he wasn’t.” Nods of recognition will probably be most vigorous among those for whom missing toothbrushes are an ongoing issue. (Parents of older children may feel the real work hasn’t even started yet.) The film takes place in an exact milieu: Johnny is a journalist, Viv a novelist, Jesse’s father a classical musician. The aesthetic is just as particular. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan shoots in warm, lustrous black and white. Together with the cities Johnny visits — Detroit and New Orleans — it can feel as if, alongside the making the film, Mills was also staging a slightly portentous art project: America in Monochrome. But it can be beautiful too: LA traffic has the look of a train of lost souls.

The film often faces two ways at once. For all the high-end, low-key mood, Mills also makes the most of Norman’s big-eyed charm, coming close to the twee horrors of kids-say-the-darndest-things. But then kids do say the darndest things, Jesse’s fixation with death typical of a certain kind of morbid pre-teen.

More powerful still are Johnny’s interviewees. Their clear-sighted fluency makes a pointed contrast to the grown-ups, often mired in regret and confusion. (Kudos to Mills for making the central adult relationship not a romance, by the way, but the tangle between siblings.) If the movie can feel just a little curated, what it tells us is worth hearing anyway. Generationally, to listen and learn should always be a two-way street.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from December 3