In its gentle, compassionate way, the unassuming drama Little Men says as much about self-preservation and mistrust as any hand-wringing, message-based movie. Director and cowriter Ira Sachs uses a simple story about the friendship between two teen boys as a springboard to address the myriad obstacles that keep people from different walks of life from seeing eye-to-eye. Never smug in its observations and always fair to all its characters, Little Men leaves us moved in an offhand, almost accidental manner. The film has all the breeziness of an ordinary day, albeit one with gray clouds on the horizon.
The film’s stars are Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Ehle as Brian and Kathy, a married couple living in New York who has just moved into the Brooklyn home of Brian’s recently passed dad. But the story’s center point is their son Jake (Theo Taplitz), a shy aspiring visual artist applying to a prestigious art academy for high-schoolers. The family’s new home is in the same building as a mom-and-pop boutique run by a Chilean woman named Leonor (Paulina Garcia), who was friends with Brian’s father for many years. Now that his father’s dead, Brian needs to think about raising the rent on her store, something his father hadn’t done in decades.
While tension grows between Brian and Leonor, a friendship forms between their sons. Tony (Michael Barbieri) is a gregarious oddball who longs to be an actor like Brian, but because his family isn’t as wealthy as Jake’s, it’s going to be much harder for him to get into the same academy as Tony. The roots of the teens’ bond isn’t entirely clear—there’s an implication that perhaps Jake is smitten with Tony—but part of it seems to be that, because they’re both only children, they share a longing for companionship that’s unique to kids like them.
From that setup, you can probably guess what’s going to happen. And you’d be both right and wrong—the specifics of how Brian and Leonor’s clash resolves itself aren’t nearly as important as how Sachs puts into motion the familiar pressures of family, money and career that consume the adult characters. Sachs and cowriter Mauricio Zacharias don’t throw many twists at us, which doesn’t mean that the film’s terribly predictable. It’s more accurate to say that Little Men proceeds in a wistfully recognizable way: Nothing that happens is surprising, but that’s only because Sachs follows the story through to its logical conclusion, with each step along the way believable and unavoidable.
Sachs has said that Little Men is the third film in his so-called New York trilogy, which started with 2012’s brutally sad love story Keep the Lights On and continued two years later for the much brighter (but still melancholy) Love Is Strange. Little Men is closer in spirit to Love Is Strange, using a deceptively everyday tale to poke around the corners of New York City to get a sense of the city’s class divisions. There’s no question that Jake and Tony come from different socioeconomic strata, but Sachs neither goes for the obvious observations nor does he present either family in exactly the way we’d expect.