Mixtape

It’s cute. No, really. It’s not gonna blow you away, but it’s fun and sweet and earnest. It doesn’t have a high ceiling, but every movie doesn’t need to either. Beverly, a middle school girl, lives with her grandmother in Spokane in 1999, because her mom and dad died young, before Beverly could get old enough to know them. Beverly finds a mixtape her parents made and goes on a quest to find all the songs as a way of getting to know them. I like that the songs aren’t what you’d expect. There’s only a couple of known bands, and they aren’t represented by their most famous songs. It makes the mixtape feel more personal and curated by living beings rather than a collection of obvious hits. These characters we never meet seem more real, which is important because you feel how important they — the songs and her unknown parents — are to Beverly. Beverly herself is a ball of sunshine, seemingly unflappable until you see she is. This quest is just as much finding out about herself as it is who birthed her. Her grandmother, meanwhile, still hasn’t processed the grief, pushing back on Beverly’s quest because it looks to her like the path that Beverly’s mom (her daughter) went down before dying. It’s not laugh out loud funny, but it’s charming and heartfelt and never boring. And, nicely, it’s something you can watch with your kids.