All the Right Moves

Dakota Johnson flexes her producing nous in a team-up with triple-threat newcomer Cooper Raiff for charming coming-of-ager cha cha Real Smooth. They tell Total Film how they nurtured a personal project following a man-child party-starter to Sundance awards triumph and an impressive Apple TV+ sale...

- By Jane Crowther

If CODA's recent awards success has taught us anything, it's that the Audience Award at Sundance is something of a bellwether for nabbing hardware further down the line. (Minari also took home the accolade and subsequent gongs at the Baftas and Oscars.) Add to audience anointment the serious promotion and campaign spending power of Apple TV+, which CODA picked up when it was bought by the streaming giant at the fest, and it's not unrealistic to have high expectations for the contender power of gentle indie bildungsroman Cha Cha Real Smooth.

I don't think you ever go in with the intention of winning something, or selling it to a certain home, or selling it for a certain amount of money, says writer, director, producer and star Cooper Raiff when we catch up with him at South By Southwest in March.

I just wanted it to be a great movie that my friends and family were going to love, and that I was going to love, and that hopefully other people were going to love as well.

FINDING THEMSELVES

Audiences at SXSW certainly loved the tale of an aimless college grad Andrew (Raiff) whose kindness and puppy-dog enthusiasm see him fall into a job as a bar/bat mitzvah party-starter (the guy who gets a room of self-conscious sullen kids dancing). At one of his events he meets Domino (Dakota Johnson), an older woman who's engaged to a proper grown-up (Raúl Castillo) and mother to daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), who is autistic. Might there be a possible romance between two people negotiating their way through different stages of life? Add to the mix Andrew's propensity to self-sabotage as well as his love for his mum (Leslie Mann), who has bipolar disorder, and younger siblings, and Cha Cha is a portrait of life when it isn't... well, smooth.