Making friends and keeping them can be hard enough as it is. For Jake and Tony, two 13-year-olds living in Brooklyn, they have to contend with issues of class, of family feuds and of distance, all in one of their most volatile periods of growing up. Through understated performances by both of these boys, Ira Sachs’s “Little Men,” touchingly shows how with some love and maturity even the most strained of bonds can endure.
13-year-old Jake Jardine (Theo Taplitz) and his family have just moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn after learning about the death of his grandfather Max. Max has left the apartment and ownership of the dress shop below to Jake’s parents Brian and Kathy (Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Ehle). The Jardines want the shop’s owner Leonora (Paulina Garcia of “Gloria”) to move out, but Jake has just become good friends with Leonora’s son Tony (Michael Barbieri).
Jake and Tony bond over their art and their video games, both of them with dreams to attend LaGuardia Performing Arts High School in a few years. The quiet and reserved Jake is a talented artist neglected at public school (“Van Gogh ended up cutting off his own ear,” his charming teacher informs him during class), while Tony, complete with a thick Brooklyn accent and down to Earth attitude, has the acting bug. During an acting workshop, Tony proves he’s a natural, sparring with his professor in an observational exercise of repeating the same comment back to the partner. Continue reading “Little Men”