109 min | R | November 19, 2021 | A24
A commercial-radio journalist who interviews kids for a living suddenly has to raise one. His nephew is nine, relentless, and smarter than the questions Johnny gets paid to ask. Turns out the man who records children for a living has no idea how to listen to one.
Johnny travels the country recording children’s answers to big questions about the future. He works alone and lives alone. When his sister Viv needs help, he takes custody of her nine-year-old son Jesse for an open-ended stretch that pulls him across Los Angeles, New York, and New Orleans. The premise reads like a sentimental man-learns-to-parent story. Mike Mills is after something harder. The film is about how adults perform competence in front of children and how children see through the performance immediately.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny with his volume turned all the way down. He strips out the tics and intensity of his louder roles and gives Johnny a watchful patience that keeps cracking under pressure. Woody Norman plays Jesse as a real child rather than a screenwriter’s idea of one. He is exhausting, manipulative, curious, and genuine in the same scene, and Norman never softens him into a prop. Gaby Hoffmann plays Viv over phone calls that carry the weight of a marriage and a mental-health crisis happening offscreen. Scoot McNairy plays her husband Paul as a man whose illness the film treats with patience instead of judgment.
Mills writes and directs with a documentary instinct that runs through the whole structure. He cuts the fiction together with real audio interviews of children answering Johnny’s questions about cities and families and death. Robbie Ryan shoots in black and white that flattens the glamour out of three major cities and turns them into ordinary places where ordinary people struggle. The choice removes the postcard and leaves the texture. Mills builds the editing around interruption, letting Jesse derail conversations the way actual children do, so the rhythm of the film matches the rhythm of caretaking.
This is a film about the gap between asking questions and hearing the answers. Johnny knows how to record a child. He does not know how to be present for one until Jesse forces him to learn in real time. Mills refuses the easy resolution where the man is fixed and the child is grateful. He ends instead on the idea that the work of paying attention never finishes, and that the people who matter are the ones who keep asking you to remember it.