‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’ Review: A Quintessential Dude With Attitude and Crush on Older Woman Sundance Film. That’s a Good and Not So Good Thing
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticHe’s a cha cha real smooth talker. He’s 22, tall and handsome with a beard, but not a scruffy hipster beard — more like a post-millennial, post-ironic traditional beard, which sets off features that are finely chiseled in a Middle American corporate way. (When he grins, he looks like Donny Osmond.) He’s just out of college but has no idea what he wants to do.
He’s a Zoomer spinning his wheels, part of a tradition of aimless rebel slackers that stretches back to “The Graduate.” He’s sincere but a bit smarmy, a “nice guy” who knows how to use his sincerity. (He says stuff like, “I feel there are things that you just, like, don’t say to me.
And I can’t tell whether you’re, like, holding back a desire to be close, or a desire to be distant.”) He is, of course, good with the ladies, maybe a little too good, which is why he attracts the amorous attentions of a mother he meets at a bat mitzvah, played by Dakota Johnson.
And he’s got problems, but they’re sort of white people problems. You could call them old-school indie-film problems. Andrew, the hero of “Cha Cha Real Smooth” (he’s played by Cooper Raiff, who wrote and directed the movie), is a charmingly annoying, selfish at heart but meticulously other-directed, oh so familiar Sundance Film Festival character.
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