Cha Cha Real Smooth, the sophomore feature from the young, hyped up actor-writer-director Cooper Raiff, opens with Andrew, the lead character, at age 13, telling his mother that he’s in love. The problem? The object of his affections isn’t one of his peers, but the party-starter at the bar mitzvah he’s a guest at. Undeterred by the (illegal) age gap, Andrew asks this nice lady out on a date and, thankfully, gets rejected. On the drive home he weeps in the backseat of his parents’ car and his mother (the ageless Leslie Mann), defying his father’s protestations, crawls into the back seat to console him, cooing “my baby’s heartbroke.”

This scene is meant to establish three things about Andrew: he attends a lot of bar mitzvahs, he’s a real go-getter, and he likes older women (which, again, might have something to do with his mom looking like Leslie Mann). But it also reveals something about Raiff, which is that he’s only capable of writing female characters who either stroke or scar the egos of his male characters. Throughout the entirety of Cha Cha Real Smooth the adult Andrew, played by Raiff, is searching for something, and what he discovers is that people, especially women, really, really love him, but sometimes they’re scared to say how much they love him, but that’s kind of ok, because they help him grow anyway, especially when they remind him that the most important thing in life is to make sure that he prioritizes himself. It’s enough to make anyone with even the remotest sense of shame sick.

We’re reintroduced to Andrew after he graduates from Tulane and moves back to his hometown of Livingston, New Jersey where he takes a miserable job at a food mall court to earn money meant to finance a trip to Barcelona, where his college girlfriend Maya (Amara Pedroso Saquel) is studying as a Fulbright scholar. Then, one fateful night, he chaperones his little brother David (Evan Assante) to a bummer of a bat mitzvah where no one seems like they want to dance. Taking matters into his own hands, Andrew goes to each and every table in the building and cajoles them onto the dancefloor, charming all of the kids’ mothers in attendance, who ultimately suggest that he start his own party starting company. But things get complicated when he meets Domino (Dakota Johnson), an absurdly young and absurdly named mother who, if rumors are to be believed, has slept with a number of men in town who are already spoken for. She’s charmed by Andrew when he manages to convince her autistic daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt; credit where it’s due, Raiff had the good sense to cast an actress on the spectrum for this role) to slow dance with him, and asks if, in addition to his food service and party starting duties, he would be interested in babysitting Lola. Sparks fly, and most of the rest of the film’s runtime focuses on whether Andrew and Domino will or won’t, as well as whether or not they even should in the first place.

Sporting a gigawatt smile and disconcertingly enthusiastic eyes, Andrew looks and acts like a college orientation leader. He gasses kids up by making them think he’s treating them like adults, speaking in a stitled, overly formal way that is meant to convey both earnestness and sheepishness, like the only way he can be straight forward is by pretending he’s joking. The kids in the movie like it because they feel like they’re being treated like adults, the adults in the movie like it because someone is finally getting through to their kids. Viewers’ mileage may vary but I, for one, hated it. What Raiff tries to sell as whimsy and charming immaturity reads to me like disingenuousness, a cheap way to grasp the attention of the nearest audience and get the approval he so desperately craves. On the surface, he just wants to hook up with Domino. But what he’s really pursuing is a sense of affirmation that he’s actually as special and desirable as he believes himself to be. Whether Andrew or his creator realize it, this doesn’t make him charming – it makes him desperate, insecure, and, worst of all, bland.

If there’s any character in this film who isn’t bland, it’s Domino. Throughout Cha Cha Real Smooth, we’re meant to think that Andrew is stuck in a limbo between man and boy, but really it’s Domino who’s stuck – trapped, even. One of the reasons she hires Andrew as a sitter is so that she can go out and live her life while her lawyer fiance Joseph (Raúl Castillo) jets back and forth from a case in Chicago. But you get the sense that each night out makes her feel a little older, and that the highlights of her evenings are the quiet conversations she gets to share with Andrew when she returns home. And yet, when she does try to play the role of tame suburban mom at the near infinite number of bar mitzvahs her daughter attends, she can’t suppress her raw allure. Her dancing isn’t raunchy, but it is flirtatious, and Johnson makes the most of her inherently mischievous gaze, slicing her eyes across the dancefloor towards Andrew to let him know, however silently, that she’s there out of more than a sense of maternal obligation.

Sadly, Raiff fails to wring any excitement out of this inherently tawdry situationship. In both Cha Cha Real Smooth and Shithouse, his debut feature, Raiff includes multiple scenes where the male and female leads make intense eye contact and ask each other “deep” questions like “do you believe in soul mates?” and “what does depression feel like?” This made sense in Shithouse because it was about college students, and if there’s one thing college students love to do, it’s stay up until 3 AM gabbing about this kind of bullshit. But when the characters are adults who both feel lost and lonely, leaning across a counter from each other as they suggestively munch on ice pops, one would think they’d have more urgent and profane things on their minds and that they might, God forbid, act on them.  But if Raiff removed these scenes from Cha Cha Real Smooth, it would prevent him from sharing Andrew’s brilliant suggestion to cure his mother’s (and, by Oedipal extension, Domino’s) depression (“I just wish people like my mom would listen to, like, people instead of her brain. And like good people, not shitty people”) and the metaphorical kiss on the forehead he receives as a reward (“Do you know what you look like right now? The sweetest person ever.”). 

Cha Cha Real Smooth is rife with stupid little moments like these that are meant to demonstrate to the viewer that Andrew is just, like, such a nice guy, but after the fourth or fifth time you see it play out you start to wonder why Raiff is so intent on displaying his character’s virtuousness, 

especially as the scenarios veer into the ridiculous. At Andrew’s first bar mitzvah as a professional party starter, he notices Lola sitting alone and searches for Domino, only to discover that she’s hiding out in the women’s bathroom, trying to get over a particularly painful menstrual cycle and devising a way to exit the venue without everyone seeing her blood-stained dress. With the help of his brother and a few oversized airbrushed t-shirts, Andrew shuffles Domino out of the building shame free, drives her and her daughter home, and helps put Lola to bed. Chatting while Andrew waits for an Uber, Domino reveals that it wasn’t a nasty period she was suffering from, but a miscarriage, and that she hadn’t even told her fiance that she was pregnant, and all of a sudden she’s straddling him, and the only thing that keeps the two from having sex is Andrew’s insistence that they don’t. “I want to but I feel like you don’t want to,” he says, which would make sense in the real word, where miscarriages tend to be a mood killer. But it makes no sense in the world of this script because Domino makes it very clear, from her own actions, that she does in fact want to sleep with Andrew.

Of course, this is Cooper Raiff we’re dealing with, and if there’s one thing he’s made abundantly clear over his first two films, it’s that he knows women better than they know themselves. Both Shithouse and Cha Cha Real Smooth feature female leads who use sex as a way to heal old emotional wounds. In Cha Cha Real Smooth, Domino talks about how her first husband left her to take care of Lola alone, and how that subsequently made her scared of commitment which, Raiff implies, is why she’s currently trying to sabotage her relationship with Joseph by pursuing a fling with Andrew. In Shithouse, this theme is explicit – Raiff’s Alex accuses Maggie (Dylan Gelula), who breaks his heart after ignoring him after a one-night stand, of indulging in promiscuity as a way to get back at her estranged father (apparently the worst thing that can happen to a woman is to be abandoned by a man). 

It would be lazy writing if Raiff just reused this trope in back to back movies, but things take a turn for the chauvinistic when you realize that he thinks his male characters are the real victims of this behavior. In Shithouse, Alex’s argument with Maggie spurs on a tearful conversation with his mother about how much he hates college, but the the two leads’s reconciliation (and, one would hope, Alex’s groveling apology) is yadda yadda’d via montage – two years later, at the end of the film, Maggie offers to be Alex’s girlfriend, which he takes up her up on only under the condition that they stay truly committed to each other (as far as we know, slut-shaming is still on the table). 

In Cha Cha Real Smooth, Raiff at least admits that Andrew makes some mistakes. Drunk and hopped up after fist-fighting a kid who bullies Lola, he confesses his love to Domino and tells her “I feel like you don’t want to get married, so I don’t think that you should.” Domino lets him down easy, but only after telling him how “alive” and “special” he makes her feel. Sufficiently flattered, Andrew tells Domino that “marrying Joseph is the thing that will help you the most,” which confuses her initially until Andrew recounts an early conversation they had where Domino said that doing the things that scare her the most are also the things that will help her (namely: it will stop her from jumping from man to man). Never mind that shortly after the pair’s aborted post-miscarriage hook-up Andrew calls up an old classmate (Odeya Rush, who could pass as Mila Kunis’ little sister) and engages in the kind of casual, commitment-less sex his films implicitly condemn. And never mind that he apparently never texts or calls his girlfriend, and then gets annoyed when he sees her post pictures of herself with another man on Instagram. No, it’s Domino who needs to be fixed because… she’s a mom? Because she’s sad? Because she’s older? It’s not entirely clear – we just know what when Domino has sex for the wrong reasons, it’s bad. But when Andrew does it, it’s ok, because that’s what your 20s are for! 

Cha Cha Real Smooth tries to capture the messiness and uncertainty of early adulthood, the complimentary feelings of freedom and uncertainty that accompany you as you try to find your place in the “real world.” The problem is, Raiff doesn’t live in the “real world” – depending on your source, he’s a 20-something filmmaker who already has two well-received features under his belt (Shithouse and Cha Cha Real Smooth have 95% and 86% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, respectively). While most of his peers are toiling away as PAs, Raiff is attending premieres at South by Southwest and Sundance – no wonder the worst experience he can imagine is being coveted by a sultry older woman and being surrounded by people who think he’s just the swellest guy around. So it’s no wonder the limits of Raiff’s happiness are defined by the unhappiness of the women his characters lust after, and it’s no wonder he seems to believe that if they just accepted that he’s as great as his mom says he is, if they just got over themselves and realized that this lanky, goofy frat boy has figured everything out for them already, then they’d finally be happy, which would make him happy, too. I can’t tell you what the characters in Raiff’s films feel about this – but I have no problem sharing how I feel, and I’d really appreciate it if he backed the hell off.