Warning: spoilers ahead.
New York City is the City That Never Sleeps. Paris is the City of Light. Chicago is the Windy City. And, according to Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks (2025), Montreal is a City To Waste Away In, before maturing to the Big Kid City: Toronto.
I caught wind of this film in April 2026, a few months into my exchange semester in Melbourne, Australia. As a Montrealer born and raised, I took it upon myself to rave about my city to my peers on exchange who, if they knew anything about Montreal, labelled it “Canada’s French city.” I had hoped that a movie like Mile End Kicks could provide a nuanced, thought-provoking depiction of a city as unique as its namesake. It did not meet my expectations.
Mile End Kicks features Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira), a music critic in her early twenties from Toronto who moves to Montreal to write a book on Alanis Morissette. She meets a cast of Canadians immersed in Mile End’s underground music scene. Set in 2011, the film presents a view of Montreal that both glorifies it as the only Canadian city where art can thrive, while also nullifying and reducing the city to drugs, parties, and rude French speakers. The movie misses the mark on what could have been a great way to break barriers between the Canadian anglophone and francophone worlds. Mile End Kicks uses Montreal as the backdrop to a mildly likeable protagonist’s foray into independence, simplistically reducing the city to a music scene built for Albertan male artists feigning tortured souls.
To its credit, the film accurately conveys the highs and lows of moving to a new city as a young person. Following my brief move to Melbourne, I am no stranger to embracing a city head on without fully grasping its culture. Grace is easily swayed by people who act like they know what they are doing. She holds the misconception that moving to a city known for being a centre of the arts, or a place to fall in love, means that every piece of her life will fall into place.
Archie (Devon Bostick), a Prince Edward Islander guitarist and Grace’s eventual love interest, declares Montreal the antithesis of Toronto, describing the two cities as youthfully creative and corporately bleak, respectively. Quebec’s metropolis is consistently reduced to a melting pot for free-spirited, artistic Canadians who will eventually desert it to return to what constitutes real life. However, by the end of the film, Archie consoles Grace by saying that all her tribulations in Montreal would have happened just the same if she had stayed in Toronto, ironically effacing the previously emphasized notion of Montreal’s singularity. Ultimately, since barely any aspect unique to Montreal itself was discussed throughout the film besides its so-called esotericism, I was ultimately led to wonder why the movie was even set here in the first place.
Grace’s grasp of Montreal is also coloured by her exposure to people from Quebec — only two of the main characters. Her roommate Madeleine (Juliette Gariépy) welcomes her to their Saint-Urbain apartment with open arms, a kindness she later takes for granted. While Grace does attempt to learn French, importantly highlighting the need to learn Quebec’s only official language, the film plays into stereotypes of Quebecois people being rude or unsavoury to English-speakers. From the get-go, Madeleine’s boyfriend Hugo (Robert Naylor), describes Grace, in French, as an “anglo” who is “colonizing” Quebec. An opportunity for productive dialogue is missed here, as Hugo’s prejudice against Grace is never addressed or corrected. Moreover, his disdain for her makes less sense when one considers that all his bandmates are also from other Canadian provinces.
Grace asks Archie why “French people,” (the conflation of French and francophone is not lost on me) hate her. He replies that they do not hate her, rather that they do not care about her, and goes on a tirade about needing to speak French to get a job. This scene could have been a learning moment, for Grace and for audiences alike, of the historical framework for such language laws. Instead, Archie’s pejorative attitude toward learning French in a French-speaking province adds fuel to the fire of longstanding misunderstandings. The film does little to ease, or even simply address, the depth of these century-old tensions.
There is a lack of contextualization for anything Montreal. Grace visits an iconic Montreal bagel shop, St-Viateur Bagel, which is oddly empty despite the usual hefty queue at the door. The shop fades into the background of the scene, and so the film misses a talking point regarding Montreal’s culinary history. The Mile End is a hub for young creatives, but the film seldom mentions that the neighbourhood was also built on and sustained by the immigration of Hasidic Jewish and Greek communities, to name a few. The characters scarcely mention any landmarks nor do they really discuss anything other than their own drama. Obviously, this movie is a coming-of-age one, but in spite of it being a film about Montreal, there isn’t a lot of the actual city in it.
For all my qualms with this non-Montreal Montreal, Grace’s time in the city is similar to many McGillians’ and other young adults’ experience. A common topic of conversation on the McGill Reddit page is that students from out of town fail to really leave the Plateau, Milton-Parc, and Mile End area. Young people are not necessarily to blame for this limitation. It’s only natural to want to stay in a safe and fun bubble. Still, there are so many other parts of Montreal to be explored and appreciated; like the centenary houses of Westmount or the crowded Beaubien Street restaurants of Rosemont. For those who live or choose to stay in Montreal, life goes on beyond dimly-lit basement concerts, hangovers, and bagel runs. This film starts and ends with the idea that Montreal is a sort of ahistorical fantasy land for young people to dream in before reality kicks in and they return to their hometowns.
My bone to pick with Mile End Kicks is not related to the plotlines of the movie, but the minimal spotlighting on what I think should have been of central focus: the city on which the whole movie is meant to be based. The movie may be an accurate survey of many young people’s move to a new city. Nonetheless, I left the film with the bad aftertaste of seeing an unsatisfactory depiction of my city, which is as complex as the people that make it up.