23-year-old writer/director Cooper Raiff drops into the Indie film scene with a heartfelt debut comedy-drama. ‘Freshman Year’ takes a tired story and makes it something fresh, poignant, and truthful.
★★★★✰
Freshman Year shouldn’t be as good as it is. On paper, it certainly doesn’t seem to be: its former title, under which it got its 2020 US release, was ‘Shithouse‘ after all. Its premise is an all-too-familiar narrative. Cooper Raiff wrote, directed, edited and starred in this film at the tender age of 22, with its first iteration being a YouTube short he made during Spring Break in his 2nd year at college. Alongside him star unknown names. It shouldn’t work. And yet, there is something so refreshingly honest about this film, that you can’t help but be endeared by it.
The film follows Alex (Raiff), a young Texan man in LA for college. He’s six months in, has just turned 19, and is hating everything about the experience. He has no friends, he calls his mum multiple times a day (and cries after), and takes life advice from his stuffed animal. However, in an effort to immerse himself more, he attends a party with his roommate at ‘shithouse’. It’s at this party he meets Maggie, a sophomore who is also the Room Advisor for his dorm. After she invites him back to her room to ‘hang out’, the pair find themselves spending a night wandering the city, exploring themselves and this connection between them.
It’s fairly simplistic narratively, but this light plot, paired with a small central cast, allows for an intimate character study on the Zillennial college experience. There are plenty of US coming-of-age movies, but few like this. Maybe it is a generational difference in university experience and the willingness to confront the hard parts, or maybe it is just that the protagonist is so unlike most leading men. He tells his family he loves them, he cries about not getting hugs from his mum, he is awkward—not in a fun, cutesy way—but in a real, stilted, actually awkward way. His feelings of profound loneliness and homesickness are relatable to so many freshers, whether they would publicly acknowledge that or not. Contrasting Alex, you have Maggie, played by Dylan Gelula (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). Maggie represents another kind of college experience: she has a solid group of friends, gets invited to parties, and regularly hooks up with guys. However, you get the sense, through a repeated shot of her walking the same road alone, that actually, she also experiences loneliness, even if it looks different to Alex’s.
There are two aspects of this film that elevate it from your standard indie mumblecore film, and these are its screenplay and the central performances. Raiff’s script feels genuinely conversational: the dialogue is vague enough to feel age-appropriate, and when it veers into more serious territory, it retains its natural, life-like quality. Everything in this film, I can hear actually being said by college students. Raiff wrote this as a reflection on his own freshman year, a still recent memory, and the closeness to the characters is evident in the script. Evident in his choice to explore this idea of struggling to fit in at uni because you’re still so attached to your home life. Evident in his willingness to have the character based on himself be flawed in a way that sometimes makes the viewer root against him. Evident in how real it all feels. Raiff’s ability to not just have already processed his experience, but to have transformed it into a piece of art that others can relate to, is a testament to his already developed maturity and instinct as a storyteller.
When it comes to the performances, much like the screenplay, realism is the facet that makes them work. Raiff and Gelula both connect with the work so that their characters feel lived in: they have distinct mannerisms, fully fleshed-out ideologies, a past that influenced who they are now. You feel this in the awkward body language of Maggie as Alex FaceTimes his family. You feel it in the hesitation Alex shows before asking Sam about parties. You feel it from the contrast between them the second they wake up from their night together. It also helps massively that they have brilliant chemistry between them. It doesn’t feel like a grand romance whatsoever, but in both the profound joy and the worst arguments, this connection between them remains.
From a technical standpoint, it’s much clearer that it’s a debut, mid-budget indie. Not that the cinematography and editing are lacking as such, but there also isn’t anything in these elements that caught my attention in a specific way. When it uses music, it’s done well, but again, not in a way that made it a focal point. The other aspect in which you can tell it’s Raiff’s first outing is the film’s ending, which is all too neat, using a time jump to reassure us that Alex will be okay, rather than letting us sit in uncomfortable ambiguity.
In the grand scheme of things though, this film is an outstandingly promising debut for Cooper Raiff. He is young and has plenty of time to develop his craft as a storyteller. If this is the footing on which he is starting, fans of realistic and relatable stories of love, life, and coming-of-age, are in for a treat.
The Verdict
A naturalistic screenplay that highlights an alternative college experience, paired with some lived-in central performances, make for an endearing debut from writer-director Cooper Raiff. ‘Freshman Year’ will both warm and break your heart, and remind you of the inherent randomness of personal connections made at university.
Words by Rehana Nurmahi
Freshman Year is available to watch via digital from 1 October 2021.
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