“This is not what I was hoping for, this isn’t the magic I wanted.”

Science tells us that our sense of taste can only differentiate between five essential flavors: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory, also known as umami. It actually requires our sense of smell and perception of texture to create the richness of taste, the palette of different flavors and undertones that turn a meal into the sensory experience it can be.

The same might apply to Mike Mills’ latest feature film, C’mon C’mon (2021). Taken at surface value, it follows the scheme of a road movie with a radio journalist who finds himself in unexpected charge of his nine-year-old nephew. Over the course of several weeks, they will face the mundane challenges of a sudden life together and develop an intimacy that will ever so slightly readjust both of their lives, granting the boy a complementary father figure, while allowing the journalist to regain some footing in his life.

But the flavor comes with the way one tells a story – and what unfolds in C’mon C’mon is a deeply complex and touching portrayal of the human predicament in the early 21st century. Slowly adding texture upon texture – documentary snippets of interviews with youth about their fears and hopes for the future; passages from books read at night; diary entries and conversations reflecting upon the story from different angles – the film blossoms into a magical portrait of parenthood and human relationships, rendered in small nuances, moments of conflict and confusion, tender gestures.

All this is captured with a seemingly effortless subtlety that is characteristic of Mike Mills’ work and the result of his unusual trajectory. Born in 1966 in California, Mills studied fine arts at The Cooper Union in New York City under renowned conceptual artist Hans Haacke. Drawn to the New York underground scene that gathered around Aaron Rose’s legendary Alleged Gallery, a space that became a focal point for young artists from the disparate worlds of graffiti, music, fashion, and skateboarding, Mills soon found himself working as a graphic designer. With his designs for bands such as the Beastie Boys, Air, Beck, and Sonic Youth, and nascent skateboard labels Supreme or X-girl, Mills developed a singular handwriting that was less defined by style than a conceptual authorship, using the friction between text and image to inject his work with conflicting messages, subtle humor, and a profoundly human touch.

Having established himself within the alternative music scene, Mills was commissioned to produce music videos for the likes of Pulp, or Everything But The Girl, and image films for brands such as Adidas and Gap. Here he also maintained his distinct personal voice within a commercial agenda while gently pushing genre boundaries – integrating interview clips with a teenage skater couple into the video for Air’s All I Need (1998), or a series of five videos for Blonde Redhead (2007) deconstructing familiar music video tropes into conceptual filmic gestures.

Perhaps inevitably, after a series of short films and documentary projects, Mike Mills released his first feature film, Thumbsucker, in 2005. But it was with Beginners (2010) and 20th Century Women (2016) that his filmic work came into its own, drawing from autobiographic elements of his childhood and parents’ histories to compose deeply personal, layered, open-ended stories about the infinite vault of human emotion and confusion.

Over time, Mills’ body of work has accrued sophistication and richness in texture. From the minimalist approach of his early design works to the polyphonic, layered structure of his films, it reflects the human accumulation of experiences with the years; while we might not necessarily get any wiser, we certainly gain a more nuanced perspective of the world, its intricate troubles and complexities, and our place within it. Mike Mills’ films capture these daily dilemmas with lighthearted melancholy and a big heart – a non-judgmental generosity toward us flawed, tired, struggling, miraculous human souls – and project them against a larger landscape of social and political tendencies, weaving our tiny troubles into the canvas of society and history.

Nowhere is this expressed better than in C’mon C’mon, which on first viewing can be seen as a reflection on Mills’ own experience of raising a child. Simultaneously, it gently touches upon an entire palette of modern concerns: questions of parenting and how to take care of each other, the fragile balance between generations, the loneliness of our individualized ways of living and working, the uneasy suspicion of what kind of future we have been building. The sense of helplessness and fatigue balanced against moments of closeness and intimacy, reminding us what it means to be alive.