A24 Films has released the official trailer for writer/director Mike Mills‘ C’mon C’mon following a rapturous world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. You can watch the trailer using the player below.
Starring Academy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffman and Woody Norman, Mills’ latest is a deeply moving meditation on the connections between adults and children and the importance of family.
C’mon C’mon is rated R for language. It will next screen at the New York Film Festival and the movie is set to hit theaters this November.
In the movie, Johnny (Phoenix) and his young nephew (Norman) forge a tenuous but transformational relationship when they are unexpectedly thrown together. The movie is a delicate and deeply-moving story about the connections between adults and children, the past and the future.
C’mon C’mon is the story of a middle-aged man learning how to take care of a kid for the first time, set against a panorama of twenty-first century American cities and issues. It’s a story of an adult learning how to treat a child’s needs, worries, and joys with full respect; learning that they are different but not less than an adult’s.
Johnny and Jesse are thrown together in a crisis moment, in their family and in the world. Their time together is a fleeting but transformative road trip that shifts how they see each other and how they see themselves.
As they travel across the US, the ups and downs of this personal and public odyssey expands into an incandescent meditation on love, parenthood, memory, and how we keep going even though we have no idea what’s coming.
Joaquin Phoenix is Johnny, a hardworking radio journalist interviewing young people across the country about the future. Suddenly, his plans are upended by a family crisis when Johnny’s estranged sister (Hoffmann) needs him to step in as caretaker to her child, Jesse (Norman).
Johnny has lots of reasons to want to be there for his sister, but he has no experience with parenting a child—let alone one as smart and perceptive as Jesse.
It’s an emotionally loaded and often funny situation, which Mills turns into an intensely personal exploration of a man abruptly dropped into the deeply challenging and all-consuming world of parenting, with all its difficulties and wonders. Through the delightful times, sad times, hushed nights, and astonishing days, Johnny and Jesse find a tentative, yet transformative, trust.
They push one another to hang tight through anxieties, to say what could not be said, to not let each other off the hook. And as they grow closer, this delicately contained story expands to touch on things far larger: our interconnectedness, what we owe to the future, what we remember, who we remember our past with, and how caring about one another becomes a way to heal when moving into the unknown.
Blending sharpness and tenderness in every element — with its mix of classic black & white photography, vivid immersions into American cities, deeply felt performances, and unscripted interviews with real young Americans — C’mon C’mon is Mills’ most cinematically playful and far-reaching story to date.