Sundance Review: Dakota Johnson And Writer/Director/Star Cooper Raiff In ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’

deadline.com:

With a promising start with his first film Shithouse for which he starred, directed and wrote and won the Grand Jury Narrative Prize at SXSW, Cooper Raiff looms now also to be one of the breakouts of this year’s Sundance Film Festival where Cha Cha Real Smooth, his small but splendid second film for which he performs the same triple threat duties debuted Sunday as part of the Dramatic Competition lineup.

I can only imagine if the festival had managed to be in person as originally planned rather than virtual in this Omicron-stricken year it would be met with a massive standing ovation.

Raiff is bound to become an indie darling as if further proof was needed, but Cha Cha Real Smooth cements him as the real deal both in front of and behind the camera.In the wake of Ted Lasso hitting the zeitgeist by centering on a character in these dark times who is all about kindness and sweet likability, so too is Raiff’s Andrew, a genuinely nice and empathetic 22 year old who is bitten by the love bug and finds himself drawn to a somewhat broken 32 year old divorced mother of an autistic child.

That character is Domino and she is played with real soul and heartbreak by Dakota Johnson (in the first of two movies at Sundance this year) who has never been as luminous on screen as she is here.When we meet Andrew, it is in a flashback to his boyhood as he shows his romantic heart to an older woman his family has just had dinner with.