The story of the directionless young man who cannot figure out what to do with his life has produced some of the most vital American independent cinema of the last thirty years. Slacker built a universe out of it. Clerks turned it into an argument about agency and complicity. Frances Ha refined the same structural DNA into something so emotionally precise it hurt. The genre exists because the experience it describes is real and widely shared, and the filmmakers who have made the best entries in it understood that universal experience requires specific observation to translate into something that justifies a viewer's time. The specifically observed detail is the thing Cha Cha Real Smooth is missing, and its absence is more conspicuous because the film otherwise has the resources, the cast, and the platform to have been something worth seeking out.
Andrew (Cooper Raiff, also writing and directing) has just graduated from college without a clear plan and moves back home, where he ends up as a de facto party host at the Bar Mitzvahs his younger brother attends. He meets Domino (Dakota Johnson), a single mother of a young daughter with autism, and becomes attached to both of them in ways the film frames as warmly complicated and which read more clearly as a young man projecting his own need for direction onto a woman who is not available for the role he is casting her in. Leslie Mann and Brad Garrett also star.
The problem with writing, directing, and starring in your own film about a charming young man who does not know what he wants is that the critical distance required to make the character vulnerable tends to collapse. Andrew is consistently positioned as endearing even when his behavior is not, and the film declines to pursue the specific kind of interior discomfort that distinguishes the genre's best entries from its most self-satisfied ones. Frances Ha works because Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are merciless about the ways Frances deceives herself. Clerks works because Dante's emotional cowardice is the subject of the film, not something the film protects him from. Cha Cha Real Smooth keeps a layer of softness between Andrew and accountability that makes the film feel airless rather than honest.
Dakota Johnson is doing more with Domino than the role strictly requires, bringing a wariness and a specificity that makes her scenes with Raiff the film's most alive. She cannot rescue the dynamic from the problem at its center, which is that the film does not appear to recognize the asymmetry in what Andrew and Domino are getting from their relationship, but she makes the watch more worthwhile than it would otherwise be.
At a reported budget of $15 million and with Apple TV+'s platform behind it, Cha Cha Real Smooth arrives with more resources than the genre's defining entries had combined. Those resources have not produced a film more interesting than what Slacker achieved in 1990 for a fraction of the cost and without the star power. This will likely function as a strong calling card for Raiff, whose talent is real even if this particular application of it has not found the emotional honesty the material requires.
