ABC Arts Keva York

“Phoenix returns to the silver screen in Mike Mills's outwardly modest, humanist drama C'mon C'mon, as soft-hearted radio journalist Johnny – a man touched by an unarticulated melancholy but still enough of an idealist to rove the United States interviewing young people about their visions of the future. 

Adding a vérité element to the heartfelt mix are the real interview sessions with young people, at their schools and in their homes, mostly conducted with great sensitivity by an in-character Phoenix and Radiolab senior correspondent Molly Webster, playing Johnny's colleague Roxanne. The quavering, dreamlike soundscape (courtesy of The National's Aaron and Bryce Dessner) that underpins the kids' commentary does these sequences no favours.

 Mills's fiction, though crafted with palpable thought and affection, feels fundamentally demonstrative rather than exploratory, and the conclusions it offers feel correspondingly foregone.

 

The Guardian Wendy Ide

This is a movie about listening – really listening – to what other people have to say. Johnny’s work involves interviewing kids, tapping into their hopes and fears for the future. Jesse, an eccentric, endearingly odd nine-year-old, refuses to be recorded but immerses himself in the sounds around him. And through a series of late-night phone calls, Johnny and Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), Jesse’s mother, reopen the lines of communication that were felled after the death of their mother.

Appropriately, sound and music are key.

the film’s main assets are three extraordinary performances: Phoenix, rumpled and emotionally untucked as Johnny; Hoffman, loving and hurting fiercely as Viv; and Woody Norman, delivering one of the most remarkable performances, by a child or otherwise, of the year.

 

New York Times Manohla Dargis

A story about love and the eternal tug of war between self-interest and caring for others, “C’mon C’mon” is a nice movie about characters who are so nice that I almost feel bad for not being nicely disposed toward them or this movie, even with Joaquin Phoenix as the guy and Gaby Hoffmann as the sister. 

 

Phoenix, bearded and in full shambolic mode (he often looks as if he just woke up), nevertheless makes an appealing center of gravity. That’s useful, because the more Johnny gropes his way through his parenting duties, the more exasperating the character becomes, and the more precious and self-regarding the movie feels.

it’s difficult to know whether Mills thinks these thoughts are revelatory or whether he wants us to think that Johnny — a 21st century, presumably well-educated, ostensibly enlightened bougie, NPR-style journalist — has been living under a rock.