The love story told out of order is having a moment, and it is easy to see why filmmakers keep reaching for it. A relationship, remembered, is never a straight line; it is a scramble of vivid peaks and sudden lows with a blurred middle, and structuring a film to match the way memory actually works can turn a familiar arc into something quietly revelatory. Both Past Lives and Materialists from Celine Song did it. Charlie Harper reaches for the same effect, and reaches it more than half the time, which is enough to make it worth seeing and frustrating in equal measure. This is a movie with a real idea at its center, undone from greatness by two decisions, one structural and one in casting, that a single further pass could have fixed. It comes achingly close.
Charlie Harper follows Harper and Charlie, two young people who meet at the tail end of high school, fall for each other, and leave their old lives behind to try to build a new one together in New Orleans. Harper is driven, chasing a career as a chef with laser focus; Charlie is not, a smart and searching young man who cannot quite figure out what he wants. The film charts their relationship across roughly seven years, from its beginning through its slow, sad fizzle, not a spiral out in flames but a gradual settling into a lower place, told in fragments arranged out of sequence. Emilia Jones, of CODA, plays Harper, and Nick Robinson plays Charlie, with Nicholas Cirillo, Virginia Tucker, and Sebastian Delascasas in support. Tom Dean and Mac Eldridge direct from Dean's screenplay.
This lands at a high 4 out of 5, and the thing that so nearly pushes it to five is the idea underneath the structure. The film uses its nonlinear form to make an interesting argument: that we never experience a relationship in real time or in reality, but always through the tint of our own perception, so that no two people's version of the same love is ever quite accurate. Robinson's Charlie states it directly, that he remembers the beginning and he remembers the end but the middle is a jumble out of order, and the film's fractured chronology is built to put you inside that distortion. As a psychological premise it is rich, the kind of thing that can make a small romance feel like it is reaching for something true.
The trouble is that the film explains the trick too early and too explicitly, and that is the first of its two fatal-to-a-five decisions. Handing the audience the thesis outright near the front, having a character narrate the exact conceit the structure is supposed to embody, muddies the very effect it is describing. A revelation like that wants to arrive late, to click into place at the end and recolor everything you have watched, so that the disorder resolves into meaning in retrospect. Front-loading it flattens the mystery into an instruction, and the movie spends the rest of its runtime illustrating a point it already made rather than building to one. It is not that the structure stops working; it is that it works less than it should, its cleverness declared instead of discovered.
The second decision is the bigger problem, and it lives in the character of Charlie. Robinson, an actor who has never quite been a favorite of mine but who is very good here, is playing a specific and by now deeply familiar type: the listless, over-read, underachieving young man who knows he is smarter than his circumstances and simply cannot summon the will to do anything about it. He is a mumblecore creation, a cousin of Dante from Clerks or the drifting figures of a Richard Linklater film, an archetype we have watched over and over. That is not automatically fatal, but it becomes a problem when the film sets him against Harper, who is his opposite in every way, motivated, driven, certain of what she wants, established early in a sharp scene built around their differing outlooks. The contrast makes Charlie feel almost anachronistic, a Gen X slacker with his books and his poetry dropped into a story about two people coming of age at the end of the 2000s, and the mismatch quietly undermines the romance.
The archetype could still have worked, and the film's failure to make it work points at what is missing. A character with no plan can be compelling when the story understands that having no plan is itself a choice, when we get the moment where he could take another path and consciously declines it. Charlie never gets that beat. He has an evident thirst for knowledge and he does work, but the film never lets him articulate, even to himself, that his drift is a decision rather than a default, so his aimlessness reads as a writing convenience rather than a character. There is a version of this man, one who looks at the driven life Harper is building and says he could do that too and just does not want to, that would have given the film its missing spine. Some allowance is due, since these are people barely out of their early twenties and a not-fully-formed sense of direction is true to that age, but the movie needed to know the difference between a character who is lost and a character it has simply left unfinished.
There is also a missed opportunity in the setting that is worth naming, because the film chooses a specific and loaded period and then does almost nothing with it. The relationship begins in 2008, with the couple graduating high school directly into the teeth of the financial crisis, and spans the years that follow, and yet the enormous economic and social upheaval of that moment barely touches the story. Setting a sweeping, near-decade-long romance in the recent past is a defensible choice, arguably a necessary one to sidestep the pandemic, but if you are going to plant your characters at the exact hinge of the Great Recession, that context should press on them. There was even a ready-made texture to reach for, the recession-era club music of roughly 2008 to 2012, all defiant, doomed euphoria, the sound of people determined to have one good night against a backdrop of lost jobs and unpayable rent. That undercurrent, upbeat surfaces over real dread, is exactly the emotional weather these characters are living through, and the film leaves it almost entirely untapped. Two young people moving to a new city to chase a life in the middle of an economic collapse is a premise loaded with resonance the movie declines to detonate.
None of this sinks Charlie Harper, because the performances hold it together. Jones is excellent, bringing the same honesty that made CODA work, and Robinson, whatever my reservations about the character on the page, plays him with real texture. Their chemistry is genuine, the film is sincere in a way the current romance landscape sorely needs, and both leads do work strong enough that awards-season recognition for one or both would not surprise me at all. This is a good movie that keeps flashing the great one it could have been, held back by a thesis explained too soon and a leading man left a draft short of whole. See it, for the performances and for the sincerity, and for the small ache of watching something come this close. One more pass, and it is a five. As it stands, it is a very strong four, and worth your time in a theater.
