Once in a while, you see an actor who isn’t held back by the decorum that rules even most good actors. Her emotions don’t stay in check — they spill over the sides. When that happens, you may find yourself connected to her presence in a way that tugs your own buried feelings into the light. To me, the gold standard for this kind of acting is Chloe Webb’s performance in “Sid and Nancy” (1986). Webb played Nancy Spungen as a selfish groupie and unabashed junkie harridan, with a wail (“Si-i-i-d!”) that could frighten the damned. Yet part of the character’s mental illness is that she had no boundaries; she was all raw feeling torn asunder. Her pain and rage, her desire to be coddled and loved all announced itself with a furious punk purity. Webb broke your eardrums and your heart at the same time. She gave one of the greatest performances in movie history.
I’m not saying that what Barbie Ferreira does in “Bob Trevino Likes It” is on that level. Yet there are moments when Ferreira’s uncontrolled quality of damaged yearning reminded me of Chloe Webb; that’s how directly she touches the audience.
Ferreira, who is best known for portraying Kat Hernandez on the first two seasons of “Euphoria,” plays Lily Trevino, who lives in a small town in northern Kentucky, where she’s a friendly and aimless 25-year-old slacker. Really, though, she’s a basket case. The film opens with her discovery that her boyfriend cheated on her. He sends her a post-hookup text by mistake, and she writes LOSE MY NUMBER YOU JERK…only to erase the text and send a “nice” message with a smile emoticon instead. That tells us a lot about Lily. She’s a pathological people pleaser, to the point that she denies her own being. An early scene in which she has dinner with her dad, the sixtyish grinning goateed Bob (French Stewart), who lives in a mobile-home retirement community, makes us think that he’s some sort of prickly “charmer.” But we aren’t seeing the half of it.
Still reeling from her breakup, Lily wanders into a clinic for a walk-in session with a counselor-in-training, and she unfurls her life story. It’s so harsh that the counselor (Ashlyn Moore) winds up in tears. That’s one of the film’s only moments of fake “quirky comedy.” Yet it’s still an amazing scene for the matter-of-factness with which Lily lays out her story — how her mother, a drug addict, abandoned her when she was four, and how her father did things like lock her in a room for 24 hours, always implying that she was the problem. But as Lily puts it, “Despite what my father says, I’m pretty sure it’s not entirely my fault.” That she thinks it was her fault at all reveals how people can emerge from psycho family situations with their entire sense of reality stunted.
As an actor, Ferreira has an instinct for comic shading. She makes Lily as charismatically blinkered in her surface sunniness as Jack Black. Yet the key to Ferreira’s performance is that she never uses comedy as a crutch. She shows us, at every turn, the woman who’s buried under the compulsive nice-girl trappings, the woman who Lily herself can’t even see.
She agrees to accompany her dad on one of his dates, and this is where we really see who he is: a Southern-gentleman narcissist, with bizarre cheapskate tendencies. The actor French Stewart makes him arrestingly complicated in his bullying. When Lily accidentally (or maybe unconsciously) sabotages the date, Bob’s inner monster comes out. He no longer wants anything to do with her. And while we can see what a sicko he is, what’s even more overwhelming is how alone this leaves Lily. She works as a live-in health aide to Daphne (Lauren “Lolo” Spencer), who has progressive muscular dystrophy, and the job allows her to loll around a lot, but apart from that professional relationship she has no one. And Ferreira lets us feel the agonizing gnaw of that isolation.
That’s why Lily does something a bit nutty that, in its childlike way, also makes perfect sense. She goes on Facebook and randomly types in her dad’s name: Bob Trevino. A handful of other Bob Trevinos come up. She gravitates to the one with no photograph and sends him a hi-how-are-ya message, asking if the two might somehow be related. She’s reaching out…to a total stranger. Because she has somehow convinced herself that maybe this other person named Bob Trevino…could be…sort of…like her dad.
The other Bob, played by John Leguizamo, is himself a loner, so for no good reason he clicks “like” on her message. And slowly, tentatively, the two begin to correspond. And reveal who they are. Until, finally, they meet. It happens rather spontaneously, when she’s grappling with an overflowing toilet and he comes over to help. He ends up buying her a bunch of house tools.
Bob lives in Wichita, about an hour away. He does nothing but work and has time to spare. There’s never a hint of anything romantic or sexual between the two of them. Lily literally just needs another person in her life. And Bob, as we learn, is a house-building contractor who’s devoted to his wife, Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones), for reasons at once good and sad. They genuinely love each other, but they had a child, born with a congenital condition, who they lost at 21 months. And they haven’t been torn apart by the grief that has never gone away so much as they’ve made a gently suffocating cradle out of it. (Jeanie has turned scrapbooking into her life.) So Bob needs someone too.
“Bob Trevino Likes It” sounds like a social-media-age fairy tale, except it’s not. The film’s writer-director, Tracie Laymon, based it on her own experience, and we all know that plenty of people meet online in the most happenstance of ways. That’s not a big deal. What matters, in a movie like this one, is that we believe what takes place between the characters — who they are and the ways they connect, and how their relationship evolves. Is it cutesy glorified-sitcom buddy-bonding indie pablum, or is it real? “Bob Trevino” turns out to be a kind of “Marty” for the Internet age, with the two lead actors interlocking in a beautiful way.
I started off as a huge fan of John Leguizamo, in the days of his earliest Off Broadway one-man shows (like “Mambo Mouth” and “Spic-O-Rama”), but in the movie that first turned me on to him, the four-guys-in-the-Bronx drama “Hangin’ with the Homeboys” (1991), he didn’t have that Leguizamo brashness; he played the equivalent of the Ron Howard character in “American Graffiti.” And he was fantastic. That’s the Leguizamo we see here. He makes Bob a quiet man of churning feeling who, at the same time, is so sincere that he can’t help but reveal himself. Leguizamo instills Bob with a touching tenderness. One of the many terrible stories from Lily’s childhood has to do with a dog that was taken away from her, and when Bob brings her to a pound and invites her to cradle a pooch who could have been that dog, you know you’re seeing a four-hankie movie scene, but the film earns it; and if it doesn’t get to you, you’re probably the kind of person who would take a dog from a child.
Bob is drawn to Lily because she’s so clearly flailing; he can’t not help her. She razzes him — for his bad jokes, and for his truly awful basketball dribbling. He tells her that “we’re all a bit broken,” as they wait at a camp site to see the July meteors he ritually wishes upon. He’s right, but his real message is that you can’t let your broken life just sit there. You’ve got to find some tools and fix it.
“Bob Trevino Likes It,” which opens today, has had a journey into theaters that is rather emblematic. A year ago, at the 2024 edition of SXSW, it won the Grand Jury Award and the Audience Award in the Narrative Feature categories. For a small indie drama, that’s hitting the jackpot. Yet here we are a year later; it took that long for the film to open on four screens in New York and L.A. And despite the fact that it’s got two name stars, I don’t sense some major visibility quotient. In the ’90s, a movie like this one might have had a chance to catch on. In its small-scale way, it’s a crowd-pleaser. (It’s three times as convincing as “Between the Temples.”) But whether you see it with a crowd or not, “Bob Trevino Likes It” leaves you grateful to be in the company of characters who make being lost, and healed, this honestly affecting.
