Vague Visages’ Mile End Kicks review contains minor spoilers. Chandler Levack’s 2025 movie features Barbie Ferreira, Devon Bostick and Stanley Simons. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

If you’ve ever been a freelance writer, Mile End Kicks will feel less like a comedy and more like a waking anxiety nightmare of all your worst fears coming true. The 2025 coming-of-age comedy from writer/director Chandler Levack (Roommates) takes place in the halcyon days of 2011 when Montreal was the center of the music landscape, thanks to the success of Arcade Fire and Grimes, but it doesn’t coast on nostalgia for that early 2010s wave of Pitchfork-approved indie and electronica albums. In fact, strip away the cultural specificities of the industry backdrop and the film works better as a horrifyingly lived-in depiction of financially unstable writers.

Barbie Ferreira stars as Grace Pine, a character surrogate for Levack herself, who was a professional music critic prior to her burgeoning filmmaking career. The protagonist works as a young staff writer for a Toronto-based magazine and feels out of place in a boys’ club office environment, so she follows in the footsteps of many aspiring writers who move to a brand new city in hopes of a writing a magnum opus. Mile End Kicks works as a non-fiction tome on Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill (1995) and the protagonist’s personal relationship to the music, as Grace relocates to Montreal to reinvent herself for the summer with a coming-of-age checklist. She intends to finish her first draft, fall in love and learn French. All of this goes out of the window as Grace becomes a publicist and finds herself in an odd love triangle with two members of the band Bone Patrol — the celibate-by-choice Archie (Devon Bostick) and the cocky vocalist Chevy (Stanley Simons).

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Mile End Kicks’ examines worst-case scenarios for looming deadlines, unpaid invoices and late rent payments. Grace is an easily sympathetic character who frequently contends with the ingrained misogyny of her industry, though she also procrastinates until she’s literally penniless. Levack’s depiction of the music scene invokes some warm nostalgia, but when placed next to a more sobering portrayal of a writer’s professional failures, it feels cutting. For Grace, the dream of being an artist meets a cold financial reality that doesn’t affect anybody else in her orbit.

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Mile End Kicks also provides a rich portrayal of writer’s block, with Grace moving to a new city to find inspiration, only to procrastinate while drafting her book. Her initial pitch (which gets her a commission) examines the success of Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill and how female rage became a marketable concept, allowing women to articulate their anger in a public space. Grace also finds the personal aspect gradually disappearing from her prose, as her arguments become generic and reliant on beat-for-beat, Wikipedia-style recounts of the album’s cultural legacy. However, Levack doesn’t make the protagonist’s journey about regaining her writing voice. Instead, she documents the fallout of losing a creative edge when it’s needed the most. Mile End Kicks is an anxiety-ridden document of a writer’s worst fears and impulses writ large.

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Levack’s screenplay is particularly insightful when it comes to the misogyny of journalistic spaces, particularly the behavior of Chevy, who frequently slut shames Grace because of her sexual openness (and emotionally demeans her as they grow closer). Mile End Kicks is a deliberately infuriating character study and a step-by-step guide for anyone embarking on a career as a freelance writer.

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