The biggest compliment I can give Chandler Levack’s sophomore feature Mile End Kicks, is that I had a real itch afterwards to listen to Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Let me be honest upfront: Alanis isn’t really my kind of music. But that I still wanted to listen to it afterwards suggests that something Levack’s done here works.

Unfortunately, in a similar vein to how I feel about Jagged Little Pill, Mile End Kicks is quite uneven. In the spirit of remaining honest upfront, I’ll admit that my feelings towards this fluctuated, almost perpetually. I was in, I was out. It exasperated me, and it also charmed it. I really liked what Barbie Ferreira was doing as Grace Pine, a twenty-something music critic who moves to Montreal as an escape from an abusive workplace situationship. I was less enamoured with ostensibly everyone else in the film. It’s a little bit ironic, don’t ya think?

The chief issue with Mile End Kicks is that one-hundred and ten minutes is much too long for what is essentially a boiler-plate bildungsroman featuring Barbie Ferriera. Most of the film’s runtime consists of Grace having painfully awkward at sex with the frontman of the fake band Boner Patrol (Stanley Simons), flirting with the bassist of said band, and eating her roommate’s food. Less of it is on epiphanies, the material you really need to make this kind of film work. I imagine that this will have fans; I just wish it wasn’t so long.