Cha Cha Real Smooth - Movie Review

Critics Score - 8 of 10

General Audience Score - 8 of 10

Cooper Raiff is an up and coming writer, director and producer in Hollywood that general audiences will start to notice soon. After critics responded well to his debut film S#!% House back in 2020, he’s back for another round with Cha Cha Real Smooth. After debuting back at the Sundance Film Festival, which is where I got to see it in January, and after winning the U.S. Dramatic Competition Audience Award, Apple purchased Cha Cha for a reported $15 million dollar price tag. It just dropped into theatres and streaming on Apple+ last month, and while it’s ultimately a film about, life, love and heartache, general audiences and critics alike can enjoy the melancholic emotional beats the movies hits. The humor, likeable characters and their relationships that the screenplay gives us to work with are well above average and they make this romantic drama/comedy one of the better ones I’ve seen in a while. So hit the dance floor the next time you cue up Apple+, while you wait for Severance Season 2, and shake what you got with the lovable Cooper Raiff and Cha Cha Real Smooth.

SYNOPSIS - As the film opens, we hear Lupe Fiasco’s The Show Goes On playing at a party and we see a young boy of eleven or twelve dancing. We quickly ascertain he’s got his eye on a much older, probably twenty-something year old girl, wearing a black and white referee shirt that’s directing the dances. This is confirmed when he grabs his mom (Leslie Mann) and takes her out into a hallway and says, “Mom, I’m in love.” After the party he walks across the street as she’s getting in her car to leave, he approaches her and pours out his pre-teen heart. The following scene of him riding home in the backseat, the camera outside the car window catching the reflections of the passing lights as they flickering across a dejected little boy’s face tells us all we need to know about how it all went down. We skip forward ten years and the young man Andrew (Cooper Raiff) has become an adult who’s still a bit vexed in the ways of life and love. In this post school life, his girlfriend is heading off to Barcelona, he hasn’t quite figured out what he wants to do in life and is content to just tread water for the time being. In the meantime, he manages to get an unfulfilling job at a hot dog chain restaurant called Meat Sticks, while he moonlights as a sitter to take his teen brother David (Evan Assante) to bar mitzvah’s. This is where he first meets Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her puzzle-loving autistic daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), whom he immediately befriends and persuades to join him on the dance floor.

Cooper Raiff’s character Andrew is a delightful onscreen presence, he’s so darn likable as we watch him being the life of the parties he’s in attendance at and connecting with strangers, getting people up outta their seats to have a good time and enjoy themselves. Raiff is a wonderful young actor, although we’re only a couple films into his career, his magnetic personality shines through and attracts the others onscreen and those observing him. Although it remains to be seen if he’s capable of acting in and playing more than this type of a role and character, since many have never seen him in anything, most will get on board with his performance here. Despite his outgoing nature, there’s an underlying pensive sadness to his character that we get glimpses of more and more frequently as the plot unfolds. He uses his outgoing personality and humor as a mechanism to compensate and mask some of the deeper emotional issues he’s contending with. But as the character Andrew is eventually hired to babysit Lola and his relationship with Domino becomes more and more complicated, it’s hard to not get invested in their story and root for a happy ending for all. We begin to feel like we did for Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days Of Summer, for those that are familiar with that wonderful film, if you enjoyed that one, Cha Cha will probably be up your alley.

While Raiff’s direction of the film shows good direction, the fact this is only his second film shows me there’s a lot of promise for more good things to come. But the screenplay that Raiff has written is really excellent in terms of it’s dialogue, jokes and the relationship dynamics it explores between Raiff’s own character and his family members as well as Johnson’s character and her daughter. Some of the things that happen are intentionally meant to pull at our heart strings, but the main performances sell the material so well, it’s difficult to get hung up on any extra drama the screenplay injects into the story. As I’ve mentioned before, Cooper Raiff steals the show and he works so well with Dakota Johnson, but the rest of the cast, especially the young performances of Vanessa Burghardt and Evan Assante help complete the slate of quality actors. The soundtrack and songs the film uses to elevate the individual scenes of dancing, from Funkytown to WAP, they help the film sustain the generally upbeat tone it juggles throughout. While Raiff and Johnson share gazes of longing from across the dance floor, the film sustains a nice pacing through the hour and forty-five minutes, I never felt any lag both times watching. In all the film does enough things right to put it up with the better films of the first half of 2022 for me, it might not make the top five, but it’s certainly an honorable mention.

SUMMARY - While Cha Cha flirts with some melodrama at times, Cooper Raiff and Dakota Johnson have undeniable chemistry and will work their magic over many general audiences and critics alike. So next time you want a film that’ll take you on a ride over the bumps of life and through the turbulence that love can hit, Cha Cha can make it Real Smooth.