By Bill Blake
Set in Brooklyn, NYC, Ira Sachs’ drama revolves around two boys – best friends – caught up in their parents’ real estate issues.
After his grandfather dies, Jake Jardine (Theo Taplitz) and his family inherit the old man’s Brooklyn apartment, located above a dress shop, rented by Leonor (Paulina Garcia), a Chilean migrant.
The dress shop owners son, Tony (Michael Barbieri), quickly befriends Jake, which the Jardine family believes to be a good thing for their normally introverted son.
But things quickly turn ugly between the two families. The dress shop isn’t making enough money even to pay the low rent the grandfather charged. It falls to Jake’s actor dad Brian (Greg Kinnear) to push for a rent increase in this rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood. Jake and Tony try to stay friends despite all this.
Little Men is a quiet and realistic drama about friendship and very well acted, especially by the two young leads. Underneath everything else, there are subtle themes of social standing and class that we can understand here in Australia.
Little Men opens nationally on the 8 December 2016