Film Review: CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH
By: Arnold Wayne Jones
A great farce requires crackerjack timing, a potent thriller the skillful withholding of information, but effective cinematic charm? There’s no formula for that most elusive of movie delights. Too far one way, you get smug self-awareness; too much the other, cringeworthy forced schmaltz. (Last year’s Licorice Pizza managed to embody both with its overwrought “authenticity” and meandering ideas coagulating on the screen.) Done well, though, an ideal charmer can transcend entertainment and enter a realm of sui generis enchantment.
The nouveau rom-com Cha Cha Real Smooth, despite its edge-of-0ff-putting title, finds that Goldilocks Zone. It’s pure magic — quirky, specific, complex, unpredictable. It’s a touchstone of Gen Z angst and optimism.
Writer-director Cooper Raiff also plays the lead: Andrew, a recent college grad who hates working his mall-food-court job while girlfriend’s Fulbright Scholarship has taken her overseas. To save up money so he can visit her, he moves back in with his mom (Leslie Mann, who’s never been better), younger brother David (Evan Assante) and new stepdad (Brad Garrett). Andrew accompanies David to a bat mitzvah, where his outgoing personality enlivens a dull party. Suddenly he’s in-demand as a professional party starter – introducing the guest of honor, emceeing the festivities, leading the “Cha Cha Slide” (where the movie gets its title), etc. It’s also where he meets Domino (Dakota Johnson), a young mother of an autistic teenager, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt). Andrew’s toothy smile and extroverted personality manages to win over the protective mom, but also her closed-off daughter.
Andrew is too old to be a love interest for Lola and too young for the already-engaged Domino… or is he? We already know he’s a born romantic, an open-hearted but aimless people-person whose lack of focus makes him fun but unreliable. In a different cinematic universe, this would be The Wedding Singer or Sweet Home Alabama, where the stodgy-and-wrong-for-her boyfriend is justly cuckolded, but Cha Cha Real Smooth defines such conventions. Tonally, it’s closer to a less-yuppified Jerry Maguire than a 21st century Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey-Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy. It doesn’t feel churned out, it feels lived it.
Johnson delivered a career-best performance – she underplays with the same delicately ethereal mood of a young Jessica Lange – and newcomers Burghardt and Assante provide unique presences so that when they are off-screen, you miss them. But clearly the greatest credit goes to Raiff, who seems to be the love child of Adam Scott and Oscar Isaac with the perfect amount of smarm and zero smirk. Raiff layers his character without leading the audience through his personality by the nose. The script withholds information not to be mysterious, but because some things simply wouldn’t be emphasized in reality (his incipient alcohol problem, his mother’s bipolar condition). He wins over us in the audience the same way he does the Jewish mothers at the bar mitzvahs. The script and direction are nothing short of brilliant. Cha Cha Real Smooth establishes Raiff as an important new voice … and reinvents movie charm for a new generation.
Now in theaters and available on Apple TV+.
