Cooper Raiff is a rising talent with a uniquely engaging voice. His new series Hal & Harper lets fans old and new indulge in his all-the-feels deal, writes Stephen A Russell.
If you aren’t already across the endearingly personal work of not-even-30-yet American auteur and all-around overachiever Cooper Raiff, it’s way past time to catch up. The Dallas-born wannabe filmmaker was plucky enough to tweet a link to his college-set, 50-minute short, Madeline & Cooper, to multi-hyphenate creative Jay Duplass.
The Transparent star was impressed enough to encourage Raiff to extend his adorkable story about a lonely lad trying to settle into college into a feature-length movie. Shithouse—watered down to the far more forgettable alternative title Freshman Year—went on to win Best Narrative Feature at the cancelled 2020 SXSW festival (the awards were presented in absentia).
A star was born, with Raiff dropping out of college to pursue his passion, appearing alongside Dakota Johnson in his sophomore feature, the Bat Mitzvah circuit-set Cha Cha Real Smooth. Premiering at Sundance, it won the Drama Audience Award.
Both beautifully realised studies of awkwardly emerging adulthood, the one-two nudge in the ribs and friendly muss of the hair marked Raiff as a rising talent with a uniquely engaging voice, with Variety magazine promptly listing him as one to watch. Fans old and new can indulge in his all-the-feels deal in episodic form when the achingly beautiful Hal & Harper debuts on Stan.
Hopelessly devoted
Shepherded into being by his production company Small Ideas, Raiff once again steps up as writer, director, editor and star. Depicting the Hal of the title alongside Riverdale alum Lili Reinhart’s Harper, they play co-dependent LA-based siblings bearing the deadweight of a tragic incident that arrested their childhood, capturing them in amber, unable to emerge, fully formed, into adulthood.
What makes this emotional hurdle race of life’s minor ups and major downs particularly special is the ingenious decision to have Raiff and Reinhart play not only their 20-something selves, but also as seven and nine-year-olds, respectively. Dwarfing their fellow primary school students and barely contained within teeny-tiny desk chairs, it’s a deftly discombobulating sight that immediately conveys their overbearing inner children when we jump years on from the bad news bomb.
A bold move that drops a steady anchor, holding us calm between the series’ non-linear shifts backwards and forwards, it wouldn’t work if it weren’t for both actors’ top-notch chops, allowing us to roll with this unusual casting choice.
Hal’s treading water in an unwanted college course but otherwise has little clue what to do with himself, beyond sketching drawings of everyone around him, including The Sex Lives of College Girls star Christopher Meyer as his supposed best mate, who’s not entirely convinced they’re on the same page. There’s also an intriguing push-pull with Bottoms and Lurker lead Havana Rose Liu as party pick-up, Abby, whose orbit becomes interlocked with Hal.
Presenting as neurodivergent, Hal is constantly excitable, easily distracted and obsessively fixated on his big sister’s support. The real love of his life, he’s so into Harper that he thinks nothing of commando rolling through her bedroom window at 3am to demand a mutual Maccas run. A scenario she seems to have indulged way too much in the aftermath of the very bad thing, hinted at in dribs and drabs.
Though she’s trying to impress boundaries on him, you get the sense they’d both be a bit lost without the other, a possibility that, of course, raises its uh-oh head soon enough.
Reinhart is a revelation here in a role that requires her to be the stoic big sister even though she’s every bit as destroyed inside. Harper’s going through the motions in a long-distance relationship with her first love, Jesse (Meyer’s The Sex Lives of College Girls co-star Alyah Chanelle Scott), while considering jumping ship into the arms of young mum and divorcee coworker Audrey (Addison Timlin).
Together, Reinhart and Raiff hook us into Hal & Harper’s lilting rhythm.
Daddy issues
The other major drawcard, beyond Raiff’s intimately drawn vision and his and Reinhart’s remarkable dual performances, is the wounded magnificence of Spotlight and Poor Things actor Mark Ruffalo as their unnamed but innately broken-down dad.
Bringing a crumpled quietness to his thoroughly ruffled turn, Ruffalo is almost unbearably sad as a man who just didn’t have anything left in the tank to look after the kids when they were young and so thoroughly dazed and confused by what went down. The show opens with a traumatic moment as they return from school to find him slumped and possibly not breathing, a not uncommon occurrence, it soon transpires.
The four-time Oscar nominee is incredibly gifted when it comes to unshowy performances that require so much to be said in the worried lines of a forehead. Watching his still-struggling character navigate the fraught territory of a new family unit (alongside GLOW star Betty Gilpin’s Kate) while his adult-ish kids kick up a fuss is one of Hal & Harper’s many high points.
Often indulging extended character-led montages set to heart-tugging needle drops from the likes of Frank Ocean, New Order and Sabrina Carpenter, Raiff’s unafraid of asking us to sit tight in the show’s engaging relationship beats, allowing them room to really breathe. By the time the finale rolls around, you’ll feel like you were genuinely hanging in their complicated but utterly convincing company.
When a too-tight tyre swing scene pops up in the show’s final stretch, it’s as if both timelines have folded in on one another. Stuck in place but squeezing through, the jam represents togetherness as where we need to be, embracing grief as death and love as rebirth side-by-side. If that’s super-earnest, then maybe we all need a great big dollop of goofy cute right now in these far too crazy days.
