“C’mon C’mon” is an ode to making memories

mostly silent performance); Viv’s resentment and frustration of Johnny’s carelessness, amplified by his place as their mother’s favourites; Johnny’s unresolved feelings for a former partner who haunts him in the present – they are not centred, but inform the smaller details Mills cares about. The camera does not mine these crises for expected arguments, instead we have moments like Gaby Hoffman as Viv (who spends much of the film on the phone) holding back a sob for a beat too long. Or the camera focuses on smaller details like Norman’s tiny hand lingering on Phoenix’s nose as he sleeps, or on Phoenix’s hands playing with his hair or his glasses to play off a moment of discomfort.

Mills establishes a rhythm between Johnny and Jesse that lets the structure of “C’mon C’mon” play out as a series of anecdotes from the experiences between the two over the course of their time together. Each anecdote is punctuated with a kind of a lesson, or edification, sometimes very explicitly in the form of a book Johnny reads. Johnny introduces Jesse to his co-workers, who are charmed by Jesse’s precociousness. Johnny loses Jesse in a store and yells at him. Johnny attempts to send Jesse back to his mother and then relents. Late in the film, Johnny reads from “Star Child”, a children’s book by Claire A Nivola – it’s the sequence that introduces the climactic last act of the film where the act of memorialising becomes explicit. As Johnny reads the climax of that book to Jesse, images of the past and present (and perhaps even the future) blur over us. “Over the years you will try to make sense of that happy, sad, full, empty, alwaysshifting life you are in.”

With “C’mon, C’mon” Mills is making sense – in realtime – of those happy, sad, full, empty feelings. The interviewees punctuate these moments of understanding in ways that introduce them, on the surface, as “lessons”. But this is no twee rumination on growing up; nor, the kind of generic “film we need right now” to show us how empathy works on the screen. Mills is empathetic – it’s part of his filmic marrow. But his empathy is predicated resistance to telling us all the secrets these characters carry within them. A game Jesse plays where he imagines himself as an orphan is left deliberately underexplained. Just as Carpenter sings about selecting what we want to from the past, these people curate what they wish to reveal from their lives. And, in that same way, “C’mon C’mon” feels like a curated assemblage of moments stitched together with good faith and sharpness. They are ambivalent and unresolved but careful and full of clarity – the work of a filmmaker at the height of his talents.

*****

Near the conclusion, Mills finally introduces the scene that establishes the title of the film. It’s a small and beautiful moment I won’t spoil. But in that scene, as the title – now dialogue – echoes over and over, “c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” the film begins to recognise the subtle hints that have been planted from earlier on: memory-making is not an event that comes with being still; memory-making comes in its movement. You have to live life to remember it. You cannot wait. Even as the Johnny and Jesse act as the centre, the camera is moves beyond them, extending generosity to characters that appear briefly. Time goes by with a deceptive weightlessness in “C’mon C’mon”. It’s a kind of mystical unreality that makes you wonder: how did we get from there to here? Mills’ charm is in as much in the revelations as it is in the secrets.

In a trip to New Orleans, Johnny and his team interview 9-year-old Devante Bryant. Asked to explain the tattoo on his arm, he charmingly refuses and the adults laugh. One of the crewmembers praises his insistence on this privacy: “You know what I appreciate about you? I appreciate the fact that you hold what is sacred.” If you sit through the credits, you’ll see the film is dedicated to Devante. He died earlier this year, weeks shy of his tenth birthday, to gun violence. It’s a reminder of that ephemerality of life that “C’mon C’mon” cares about. How to make sense of this sad, empty, always-shifting life? You hold on to what is sacred. And Robbie Ryan’s camera treats every moment – especially the little ones – like something sacred. Making memories is an act of commemoration. Things go on. Sadness filters through and we urge each other to “c’mon, c’mon”. Forwards and backwards. To the future, but also bringing the past with us.

I spent most of September to early December with my niece, who is seven. Earlier in the month I showed her some photos from when she was younger. She responded in astonishment and wonder, as children tend to do when confronted with their past selves. “I don’t remember that,” she exclaimed at one of images. I explained the moment to her. “Oooh, I remember now,” she acquiesced, a few moments later. I’m not sure that she did remember or if she was responding to my urgings. “C’mon C’mon” plays around with this uncertain reality. The moments we cling to with the children around us might be forgotten when they grow older. No matter how sincere. How do you tell a child, in the moment, this might matter more to me than to you in the future? And how to even abandon the limits of thinking our memories hold on to what we need.

When Johnny’s mother forgetfully asks for her father in a scene, her forgetting has not rendered her love for her children lesser. Nor has it made the hurt they have experienced with her immaterial. Memories come and go, beyond us. But we can’t remember everything. The things we experience do not disappear when we do not remember. “I’ll remind you”, Johnny says at the end. He’s talking to Jesse but he’s thinking and her lost memories, too – a hopeful promise, a slightly desperate invocation to hold on this moment as if to say, “Let me make this moment last just a little longer.” Just in that soft way Betty Buckley plaintively crooned over and over at that Carnegie Hall concert in 1996: Come on come on, come on come on, come on come on, come on come on, I will understand.

C’mon C’mon is available on Prime Video and other streaming platforms