Mile End Kicks: The Strange Sensation of Seeing Myself in the Buzzy Montreal Movie

I’m hanging at the back of the venue, not sure who to talk to. My hair is thick with wax, and my hands are stuffed in the pockets of my vintage Ralph Lauren bomber jacket, which I bought in my last year of high school. The band is good—four dudes playing loose, sardonic indie rock; the front man has a presence both enticing and repelling. It’s the kind of room I’ve been in a million times over my ten years in Montreal, and I, once again, feel a mixture of belonging and artifice, like I’m playing a part.

Only here, that feeling is not entirely a product of my psyche. We are, in fact, on a film set, and I am simply doing my job as a “background performer” (a fancy term for extra). Dozens of apparent twenty-somethings—mostly younger than me—crowd in front of me, outfitted in V-neck tees and skinny jeans, cheering on the fake band as we shoot a scene for the movie Mile End Kicks.

Now in theatres, Mile End Kicks takes place in the Montreal music scene of 2011—the year before I purchased my vintage jacket and decided, like the movie’s protagonist, to live in Montreal. Loosely based on director Chandler Levack’s own experiences, the film follows bespectacled brunette and emerging rock critic Grace (Barbie Ferreira) as she dates boys in bands and tries to write a book about Alanis Morissette. Grace’s misadventures play out against the backdrop of the city’s indie music epicentre, a neighbourhood known as Mile End (I also worked as a music tutor for the film).

Ahead of its release, the movie generated online anticipation for its promise of a nostalgic look back at the indie rock heyday in the 2010s. Emerging from Mile End’s dingy warehouses and building on the foundations laid by local label Constellation Records, musicians like pop genius Grimes and slacker king Mac DeMarco put Mile End on the international map. Mile End, in turn, gained a global (or at least continental) reputation for cheap apartments and creative ecstasy, a hub for the cultural output now sweepingly labelled “indie sleaze.”

Seen through Grace’s eyes, the neighbourhood is immensely romantic. As she watches dirtbag musician Chevy perform a song on the roof of the historic Rialto Theatre, the sun setting behind them, it’s easy to see why she falls for the city and the front man. Levack captures the sense of possibility that Mile End held in that period for tortured assholes like Chevy and wide-eyed keeners like Grace: boys who saw the world in their image, and girls trying to paint themselves into it. When I was twenty-two and living in Mile End, playing in a band with a bunch of boys, the neighbourhood offered a rhythm of life organized around art, style, and discovery.

But Grace’s Mile End, and the possibilities it held, no longer really exist. Everyone has their own version of when Mile End died. It could have been when St. Viateur West venue Cagibi left the neighbourhood in 2018, or maybe the opening of a local Lululemon in 2017. Perhaps it was before Torontonians, like me and Grace, showed up in the early 2010s once it was already buzzy, helping to fuel the neighbourhood’s gentrification. But what’s certain is that, in the time since Mile End Kicks is set, real estate financialization has skyrocketed rent prices in the city, while the provincial government has reduced key protection for renters. Many of Mile End’s DIY venues and art spaces have been replaced by an endless supply of sterile restaurants, while the bottom has fallen out of the music industry, with artists competing for fewer scraps in the streaming economy.

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Mile End Kicks codifies the symbols of an earlier, better time, with startling accuracy. Watching it, I was disoriented—and not just by the brief sight of my hair and nose in a party scene. Several scenes mirrored exact experiences I had when I lived in the neighbourhood: lugging a suitcase up a dangerously spiralled staircase; walking home at sunrise with a sweet, entirely unavailable boy; witnessing an angsty guitarist’s on-stage meltdown (though, in my case, he was performing beside me).

It’s also a reminder of some of the pitfalls of that era. The movie’s most affecting arc finds Grace reckoning with her invisibility as a woman in music, as she is variously ignored or exploited by obnoxious men around her. Like Grace, I spent too much of my young adulthood trying to appeal to boys with inflated egos, internalizing their tastes and discarding my own. There were, of course, plenty of women making thrilling music back then. But, in my experience, power lay in the hands and ideals of men, and getting anywhere meant following a set of guidelines. Be attractive, not threatening; be aloof, not earnest. Listening to Chevy tell Grace that she’s just “not chill,” I smiled in my seat. Levack films Grace with such love that I couldn’t help but sympathize with my younger self too. It was a relief to see those dynamics reflected on screen, confirmation that I hadn’t imagined it all in my head.

The film won’t speak to everyone—a couple of reviews from Montrealers have called it too Toronto—but it serves as a kind of Rorschach test for those who lived through the period. What you see in Mile End Kicks is, in part, whatever leftover feelings you have about the time. I’ve seen social media posts by women and non-binary people fondly recalling the vitality of 2011 in Montreal, on one hand, and describing the isolation of being the only exception to all-male lineups on the other. Both experiences ring true; the Montreal indie scene could be freeing and suffocating, sometimes in the same night. The last decade has seen hard conversations and public callouts about sexism, racism, and predatory behaviour in Montreal music, the highest profile of which are the sexual assault allegations against Arcade Fire’s Win Butler. Montreal indie’s biggest export has now become a symbol of the scene’s worst impulses.

All eras end. Mile End Kicks is an opportunity to remember what was so potent about that time, as well as its mistakes. I miss the energy and experimentation of that period.

But there’s also a lot I don’t miss. I find today’s Montreal indie community more welcoming and less intensely competitive, and I rarely worry about being the only girl on a lineup anymore. In the movie’s climax, Grace finally steps into the spotlight at a literary event, reading a piece about her experiences as a female music critic, where she describes feeling like she’s always on the periphery of a group of men. I remember that feeling well. And like my Urban Outfitters skinny jeans, I’m happy to leave it in the past.