Mile End Kicks opens with a line that tells you everything you need to know: Montreal runs on bagels and cigarettes. It sounds like a joke, but it frames everything in writer/director Chandler Levack’s sophomore feature, an anchor for a story about people chasing identity in a city that thrives on contradiction.
In this romantic comedy based in part on Levack’s own life, Mile End Kicks follows Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira) who arrives in Montreal in 2011 to write a book about Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill. That plan quickly unravels when she falls in with an indie band, dates two of its members, and ends up working for them as a publicist.
Levack’s script is sharp, specific, and often very funny. The humour hits harder if you know Montreal—the franglais, the passive competitiveness, the curated authenticity, all of it—but it never feels exclusionary. If anything, there’s something quietly radical about an Anglo film so rooted in the city’s texture. These stories rarely get told this way, with this kind of specificity, and Mile End Kicks leans into that authenticity without hesitation.
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