When kids become heroes in movies that are more geared towards adults, it gets childish.

And also often a bit dishonest, because children's mouths are supposed to announce the famous truth, because messages have to be announced that adults have thought up but don't dare to say themselves.

Children should teach adults humanity and spontaneity because they are sweet, funny and irresistible.

Of course, when children see something like this by chance, they immediately notice that something is wrong.

It's called didactics, it's easy to see through.

Peter Korte

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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It's interesting that there are two films coming out right now that undermine this dressing, that derive their credibility from respecting children's perspectives rather than presenting them as better people.

In Céline Sciamma's "Petite Maman" it was a little girl who mourns the loss of her grandmother, feels abandoned by her mother and finds her way in her imagination by becoming a time traveler who meets her own mother at the age of eight and becomes a playmate.

Just no didactics!

Mike Mills' "Come On, Come On" focuses on a nine-year-old boy.

However, the constellation is a bit more complicated because he plays with and alongside a star like Joaquin Phoenix.

Phoenix is ​​the radio reporter Johnny, who travels the country with a recorder and microphone to ask children about their future dreams.

These interview sequences are like the main theme of the film.

They don't come across as touching or pandering, because they are mediated from the start.

The children are aware that a man from the radio is questioning them.

The film gets its direction when Johnny offers to look after his nephew Jesse (Woody Norman).

Johnny's sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) has to travel from Los Angeles to Oakland to get her ex-husband, who suffers from bipolar disorder, into therapy.

Uncle and nephew are strangers at first, the childless man and especially the unrelated man, the precocious boy who asks questions that nine-year-olds don't usually ask - but that becomes part of the conversation instead of a distortion of perspective.

The friction between the two, the conversations, the rapprochement create the inner movement of the film as they travel externally from Los Angeles to New York and finally to New Orleans and Jesse assists his uncle in his interviews.

Once through America

Mike Mills, husband of artist and filmmaker Miranda July, has a keen sense of the tangles of growing up.

The 56-year-old has started making music videos, filming Thumbsucker in 2005, the satirically-tinged story about a thumb-sucking 17-year-old, and 2016's Women of the Century, about a mother in her mid-50s and her 15-year-old son.

They are formally original, very well thought-out films that don't just tell stories, that are very aware of their means.

Also in "Come on, come on" everything is exactly balanced.

The intensive, high-contrast black-and-white material transports the events to a semi-distance, which prevents overly attempted realism effects and straightforward identification.

Mills intersperses phone calls between Johnny and Viv and memories of the deaths of both their mothers, creating a dense family fabric in which the flaws and cracks also become visible.

Nobody is converted here

Basically, not much is happening despite the movement across half the country.

It's about listening and letting people finish speaking, it's sometimes funny, sometimes melancholic;

Jesse is totally annoying and yet wonderful;

big issues like death and illness alternate with small worries.

And nothing is forced on you, no one needs to be converted or purified.

Johnny is just trying to take on a different role and responsibility.

And Jesse learns to appreciate Johnny's honesty.

All that and more is yet to be learned from the Motion Picture Association of America, which rated the film an "R," Restricted: Children under the age of 17 can only see it when accompanied by an adult.

Probably because "fuck" is said 19 times and "shit" twice.

No wonder there are so few films like "Come on, come on".