Filmmaker Cooper Raiff On ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’, His David Harbour Pic ‘The Trashers’ & The “Really Small” TV Show He’s Making Afterwards – Q&A

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From the perspective of filmmaker Cooper Raiff, Cha Cha Real Smooth embodies a specific kind of “feel-good” spirit of which he’s always in pursuit.The Sundance Audience Award winner is the up-and-coming multi-hyphenate’s second feature, on the heels of his 2020 crowd-pleaser Shithouse, which proved a success in spite of a release hobbled by the Covid pandemic—being picked up for release by IFC Films after winning SXSW’s Grand Jury Prize.

The coming-of-age drama centers on Andrew (Raiff), a who strikes up a friendship with young mother Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her autistic daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt) while working as a Bar Mitzvah party starter.

Like Raiff’s first feature, Cha Cha is a charmingly intimate and sincere, relationship-driven indie of great quality—the kind that was able to achieve significant success and seemed more commonplace as recently as a decade ago, but is now much harder to find.As a filmmaker boasting equal skill as a performer, Raiff is reminiscent of the Duplass brothers, who began carving out their own space within the indie sphere back in the 2000s. (Raiff has named the prolific filmmakers as key influences, and has found a mentor in Jay Duplass specifically.) A key takeaway from the duo for the Cha Cha helmer has been the value to be found within small projects like it—given the conviction that they can be as commercially successful as they are creatively rewarding.Up next for Raiff is the David Harbour starrer The Trashers—a drama financed by 30West, which is based on the true story of of Jimmy Galante, a Connecticut trash magnate who bought a local minor-league hockey team in 2004 and assigned his teenage son to run it.