Sweet Thing (2020)

Directed by: Alexandre Rockwell | 91 minutes | drama | Actors: Lana Rockwell, Nico Rockwell, Jabari Watkins, ML Josepher, Karyn Parsons, Will Patton, Steven Randazzo

Billie (15) and her brother Nico (11) live with their father Adam, a loving man but also a troubled alcoholic. Their neglectful mother ran off years ago and got caught up in a toxic relationship. ‘Sweet Thing’ is an intimate portrait of a dysfunctional family in search of warmth, security and a solid ground to stand on.

Rarely does a film show so clearly how differently children and adults deal with pain, sadness and fear. The only thing that matches is the search for a way to escape. In ‘Sweet Thing’ the adults reach for the bottle and lose themselves in harmful relationships. The children, on the other hand, create a fairytale world in which they themselves are the bad guys.

Perhaps as a child it is easier to blame yourself than to believe that your parents absolutely fail to love their own offspring. However, there is not an ounce of malice in the children. ‘Sweet Thing’ shows that children are naturally good, but can lose themselves if they lack a sense of basic security from home.

Children feel a certain loyalty towards their parents, a kind of unconditional love that only exists from child to parent and not necessarily the other way around. Billie and Nico also know how to make the best of every bad situation due to their enormous resilience and adaptability. In addition, they continue to forgive their parents. Billie, with her beautiful big curly head, is like a mother to her brother and a wife to her father. She guarantees peace at home and feels responsible for the good atmosphere. Her coping mechanism expresses itself through music and in the toughest moments her great idol Billie Holiday, who gently comforts her, appears as the mother figure she never had.

When the situation at home escalates and Father Adam is admitted to rehab, Nico and Billie have to spend the summer at the beach house of their mother and friend Beaux. What starts as a -literally colorful- dream soon turns into a pitch-black nightmare. Beaux turns out to be an alcoholic of a completely different caliber and Mother Eve is caught in his trap. Meanwhile, Billie befriends Malik, a playful neighbor from a similarly broken family. After thinking they’ve done something terrible, Nico and Billie run off with their new partner in crime Malik and label themselves “the rebels and bandits,” a name that shows how childish they still are. Nico cautiously asks his sister whether they are criminals, to which she replies: ‘No, we are just children.’ What follows is an imaginative voyage of discovery with special encounters, in which they get further and further removed from their origin and grow closer to each other.

‘Sweet Thing’ was filmed on 16mm, which gives it a classic look, with a timeless edge. Filmed mostly in black and white, when narration allows, Alexandre Rockwell surprises the viewer with a beautiful, pearlescent color spectrum. Rockwell has cast his own daughter, son, wife and close friend and renowned actor Will Patton for ‘Sweet Thing’. His children have previously been featured in his film ‘Little Feet’ (2013), also shot on 16mm and also an ode to youth. It is extraordinary how vulnerable this family dares to be and it is clearly visible that this contributes to the credibility of the film. In particular, daughter Lana turns her character into a young heroine and the savior of her broken family.