Cooper Raiff, the 25-year-old writer, director, and star of Cha Cha Real Smooth, a warm hug of a new movie premiering on Apple TV+ this Friday, originally sold the project with only a vague idea in mind. For his first 10 or so pitch meetings, he told Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast this week, “I was just like, ‘I think moms are cool,’ and people were like, ‘That’s not a movie idea.’” (Someone born in the humbling year of 1997 had all these high-profile meetings to begin with because his 2020 film Shithouse, made on a micro-budget at Occidental College before he dropped out to finish production, had won the Best Narrative Feature award at South by Southwest.) “And then at some point, I had this other character that I was thinking about,” Raiff continued, “which was just the person that I know best, which is a 22-year-old dumbass. And so I kind of put them together.”
The result — after partnering with costar Dakota Johnson’s new production company, TeaTime Pictures, founded with former Netflixer Ro Donnelly — is a loving, tender-hearted, and very funny portrait of Andrew (Raiff), a college grad who’s just moved home with his mom (Leslie Mann) and stepdad, Greg (Brad Garrett). He works at a hot dog stand in the mall until, at a dud of a bar mitzvah for a friend of his little brother David (Evan Assante), Andrew successfully gets the party going, and suddenly all the parents in the neighborhood want to hire him as their own party motivator. The film’s title cleverly borrows from DJ Casper’s “Cha Cha Slide,” a song and dance that’s plagued us all since its release in 2000.
At one of these parties, Andrew meets Domino (Johnson), a beautiful, mysterious young mom, and her autistic tween daughter Lola, played by newcomer Vanessa Burghardt, who is autistic herself. Andrew bets Domino $300 that he can get introverted Lola out onto the dance floor, and Domino is so impressed when he succeeds that she asks him to babysit for them. Andrew is supportive and defensive of his new young friend, who’s sometimes bullied by her peers, without being patronizing or condescending; their relationship feels warm and natural.
The relationship between Andrew and Domino, meanwhile, unfolds with a quiet but crackling intensity. Domino is engaged to Joseph (the devastatingly handsome Raúl Castillo, of Looking fame), a serious-seeming lawyer who’s often away on business. Domino clearly adores her daughter — when Andrew asks her if being a mother is hard, she acknowledges that it can be, sometimes, though “not because of her” — but because she’d given birth so young, Domino is also mourning a youth she was never really able to have. The promise of childlike freedom and momentary escape presents itself in 22-year-old Andrew: charmingly goofy, prone to drinking too much, sweet and open, and vulnerable and kind.
