When I was 22, I was a music critic for an alternative weekly newspaper, and I recognized my own past experience from the first moments of “Mile End Kicks,” when 22-year-old alt-weekly music critic Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira) is at a concert, writing on her little notepad, and a pair of strangers ask her what she’s doing. I, too, have experienced the self-satisfaction of telling random people that you’re reviewing a concert, feeling a tiny bit of importance and admiration from others while scribbling down a set list.
I’m not Canadian, and my time as a music critic in my early 20s came about a decade before Grace’s in “Mile End Kicks,” which is set mostly in Montreal in 2011. I’m also not a woman, so I never experienced the pervasive sexism that Grace has to deal with as a female writer in a male-dominated field. But the way that writer-director Chandler Levack personalizes her story is what makes “Mile End Kicks” so effective.
