Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022)

We liked very much this sweet story about a recent college grad whose life changes when he meets his 13 year old brother's autistic classmate and her beautiful mother at a bar mitzvah. Cooper Raiff stars as Andrew and directs from his own well crafted screenplay, which has plenty of laughs and some poignancy. Dakota Johnson is the girl's mom Domino and Vanessa Burghardt, on the spectrum herself, makes a successful film debut as Lola. Leslie Mann is wonderful as Andrew and his brother David's mother and Brad Garrett's "Stepdad Greg" is stoic, taking grief from Andrew for comic relief. Raúl Castillo appears in the second act, but I prefer to let his character be a surprise to you as it was to us.

Este Haim and Christopher Stracey's 16 minutes of soundtrack is available on Apple Music and there are also great songs at the multiple bar mitzvahs. Here's a list.

Johnson was last blogged for The Lost Daughter, Mann for Welcome to Marwen, and Castillo for Little Fish. 

Raiff's previous feature (he made one before that and he directed, wrote, and starred in both as well) won the 2020 South by Southwest Film Festival Grand Jury Prize and this one, so far, has won the Sundance US Dramatic Audience Award and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at that festival.

This interesting profile of Burghardt has a spoiler in it so I suggest you read it after watching the movie. Haim, the tall blonde sister in the band Haim, and Stracey scored all ten episodes of the series Maid, and make their own film scoring debut.

 
Rotten Tomatoes' critics are dancing to an average of 86% and, even though its audiences are moving off the dance floor at 61%, Jack and I think this is well worth watching. We rented it August 24 on Apple TV/iTunes.