NOW IN THEATERS! What if the person standing in the way of your dreams is the person you love most? Directors Tom Dean and Mac Eldridge ask that question with Charlie Harper, the story of two people whose wants for themselves threaten to tear them apart.
We start towards the end. We meet Harper (Emilia Jones) and Charlie (Nick Robinson) as they reconnect during a wedding reception. A kind exchange follows, but we sense the shared memories filling the space between them. We soon leap back to their high school years when they first got together, and everything felt oh-so different. What happened? Dean and Eldridge’s movie is not about starts or beginnings of relationships; it’s about everything that comes in between.
Jones and Robinson make it real as Dean’s script plays temporal hopscotch, and we watch Harper and Charlie try to make a life of their own and together. Therein lies the rub: Harper is dialed in on her dream of becoming a chef while Charlie is a bit of a slacker, insistent that there’s nothing wrong with just being content, hanging out, drinking, and doing blow most nights. A relationship is a boat where both people must row for fear of not going in circles together. Is that what’s happening here?
Harper checks her phone with a friend in a purple-lit nightclub booth in Charlie Harper.
“Therein lies the rub: Harper is dialed in on her dream of becoming a chef while Charlie is a bit of a slacker…”
Charlie Harper is a coming-of-age narrative in a romcom disguise. Pensive piano notes and melancholy guitar twangs provide a musical backdrop to Charlie and Harper embracing, fighting, caring for each other, despairing over one another, making up and breaking down, and while those with a hankering for romcom’s usual fare of swelling hearts, dramatic proclamations, steamy kisses and misty eyes – both sad and happy – will get their fix, Charlie Harper offers a little more by delving into how heartbreak’s hard lessons can fuel personal growth.
Charlie Harper draws easy comparisons to 500 Days of Summer and La La Land with its depiction of imagined lives and the influence our partners have on our personal journey of self-discovery, but Dean and Eldridge offer those same themes in a more earthbound package that’ll likely strike a chord with a lot of people.
One could ask for a firmer depiction of the love Harper and Charlie profess to share and for equal weight to be given to Charlie’s journey, which plays second fiddle to Harper’s – it’s both their names in the title, after all – but Charlie Harper is a warm and heartfelt, yet realistic portrayal of love’s unforeseen consequences. It’s not quite a romcom, nor a coming-of-age story, but a secret third thing: a rom-coming-of-age narrative. It’s all the better for it.
"…Jones and Robinson make it real..."
