The Films of Mike Mills: A Human Space

I cried the first time I saw a Mike Mills film. It happened at a screening of his first film, Thumbsucker, at the Oslo Film Festival. It must have been 2006, and Mike was there introducing it. His honesty had already moved me before the movie began because he had talked about personal inspirations and his own background in a way that was unusual, especially for an American filmmaker who lived in LA—in Hollywood.

Since then, I have come to understand that you don’t need Mike introducing the film for it to make you cry. He is always there in his films, which share a clear voice, a distinctive gaze, a personal approach to the filmmaking process. There is a sleight of hand to Mike’s work. Like magic, it’s not clear how it works or how it’s so deeply moving, nor is it easily explained. And as for the Hollywood part—well, Mike doesn’t play by those rules anyway.

Mike Mills’s films are inhabited by human beings whose inner worlds engage us in ways that go beyond the plot or the exterior conflict. It is as if the voice of his cinema itself aligns us with the humans we are watching on-screen, and always in an unusually caring way. In his fiction features since Thumbsucker—Beginners (2010), 20th Century Women (2016), and C’mon C’mon (2021)—the characters are often flawed in their ability to function within a conventional family structure, and the tensions in their relationships are never portrayed stereotypically, in the vein of a partner or parent being an antagonistic force that needs to be overcome. The psychodynamics are rich and paradoxical in these films, just like in life.

Several of his male characters have left behind old ideas of masculinity—of meritocratic men who grapple with their missions or battles — and instead long for connection and intimacy in a world where those things are complicated, even in the closest of relationships. The films are defined by inactivity as a narrative force, telling silences, and looks that we the audience see, but no one else — stolen moments of lonely contemplation shared in a cinema, united with strangers.

The sophistication of Mike Mills’s design shows a deeper way for us to see the hidden interconnections of our unconscious motivations and movements. The real drama of life doesn’t happen when people yell at each other or make grand gestures, but rather in the tender, quiet moments of everyday despair or joy.

Like in Beginners: A man approaching midlife (Ewan McGregor) looks at his father (Christopher Plummer), who, having recently come out of the closet, is in love maybe for the first time, while dying from cancer. Could this observation of his father reshape the man’s ability to connect romantically? Slicing through many layers of human life in pursuit of love alongside loss, the film asks questions about how family dynamics affect us in our yearning to get close to one another. How does memory fail us, but also, in its glitches, give us the possibility to grow?

Or like in 20th Century Women: The film, set in 1979, portrays three women of different ages and their individual roles in guiding a teenage boy through a time of big societal changes. The mother (Annette Bening) was born in 1924 and had lived through the Great Depression, while her skater son (Lucas Jade Zumann) yearns for individuality in an increasingly fragmented world. As a multigenerational slice of American life in the late seventies and beyond, the film asks all the big questions: How do we live as children and parents? Why is communication with and connection to others so complicated? And why can’t fans of Black Flag be friends with people who like Talking Heads?

And finally, like in C’mon C’mon: A radio documentarian (Joaquin Phoenix) has to bring along his estranged nephew (Woody Norman) as he travels across America asking children how they feel about the future. Genuinely listening, and searching for meaning through openness and curiosity, he grapples with how to negotiate the difficult truths of life with a nine-year-old, a process that in turn enriches his other relationships and helps him make sense of the constant flow of time and memory in his recordings.

Despite their intimacy as character studies, these films have an impressive scope. They are always reminding us of the specific historical and cultural context of who and what we are watching, and seeing the United States through the prism of individual human experience. This is the epic quality of Mike Mills’s body of work — the questioning of human scale in the endeavor of modernity that is the American experiment.

His montage sequences—composed of successions of moving-image scenes or still photographs and a narrator’s voice that situates the surrounding narrative within a broader cultural context— are a recurring formal trope in his work. They reveal the paradox of how culture shapes us while simultaneously being sold back to us as a veneer of change, even as the universe remains the same—how the personal tragedies of lived experience can never be reduced to social analysis.

In existential terms, the films question the meaning of the material world—our objects, our presidents, our genders, our beliefs — as seen through the everyday lives of ordinary people. Similarly, in the nephew and uncle’s grappling with the passage of time and constant change, there is an awareness that things will be forgotten, yet there is also a choice to remember. By recording their thoughts, they attempt, at the very least, to “see each other” along the way — through sound, images, and words.

The Films of Mike Mills: A Human Space

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