Berkeley native Mills focuses on parenting

Mike Mills was a new parent with a toddler in 2013 when he embarked on a multimedia art project for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, interviewing children in Silicon Valley whose parents worked at tech giants Google, Oracle and Apple.

“I was really curious what these kids of people referred to as ‘futurists’ had to say about how they saw the future themselves,” Mills told The Chronicle during a recent visit to San Francisco.

The Berkeley native and director of the acclaimed movies “Beginners” and “20th Century Women” was back in the Bay Area last month to screen his latest film, “C’mon C’mon,” at the Mill Valley Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Cinema prize. It’s now in theaters.

The tenderhearted, black-and-white drama stars Joaquin Phoenix in a warm role that’s about as far removed as possible in tone from his Oscar-winning turn as the Joker. He plays Johnny, a genial radio journalist who finds himself caring for his whip-smart 9-year-old nephew, Jesse (Woody Norman), while Jesse’s mom, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), is away in Oakland tending to her mentally ill ex-husband.

The film cuts between scenes of the fictional Johnny and Jesse bonding as they travel from Los Angeles to New York and New Orleans, and actual documentary-style interviews Phoenix’s character did with non-actor children in various American cities, asking them questions Mills formulated for his SFMOMA installation seven years ago.

Mills recalls wanting to know back when he recorded the interviews in Los Altos whether those children, whose parents were developing the products and algorithms that would shape the way we’d all live and communicate for years to come, were hopeful themselves. Posing the same questions again for the movie, Mills said he still wondered: What did kids everywhere think technology, nature and relationships would look like at the end of their lifetimes?

He discovered that “they were kind of starved for that kind of attention and to be taken seriously and spoken to in an authentic, non-childish way. They had a lot to say, including really dark and super-intelligent things.”

“That was the seed of the idea,” he said, for creating “C’mon C’mon,” a film that’s been leaving early audiences weeping during screenings on the fall film festival circuit.

There’s a poignancy to Johnny’s crash course in parenting that any caregiver of young children will recognize. Phoenix’s Johnny wants to be present as a great supportive uncle, but he wonders how honest he should be in answering his nephew’s tough questions about love, family and death. He realizes that kids aren’t placated by half-truths, but he still has to fight his natural tendency to keep his emotional guard up and dodge the hard stuff, like Jesse’s repeated question: “Why aren’t you married?”

When Hoffmann joined Mills onstage at the film’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, she admitted to getting teary herself during the final scenes.

“I was just watching the ending thinking the movie’s about how hard and absolutely essential it is to love and take care of each other, and the limitations we come up against in each other, and in ourselves all the time,” Hoffmann said.

“I can be with the person I love most and suddenly I can’t stand them and don’t know what to say,” she continued. “This film touches on how we can feel all of that at the same time.”

Mills, who is married to filmmaker Miranda July (“Kajillionaire”), acknowledged that he made a film that is suffused with his own sense of awe at childhood and parenthood, and he noted how tricky and funny and profound he has discovered an adult-child relationship can be.

“As a father of one child you always feel like a novice,” he said. “I was 46 when I became a parent, and the whole experience is transformative.”

Mills is familiar with mining personal material for his movies. His 2010 film “Beginners” starred Christopher Plummer as a version of Mill’s art-world dad, Paul Mills, who served as director of the Oakland Art Museum from 1954 to 1970, while Annette Bening’s character in his 2016 movie “20th Century Women,” about a group of feminist women raising a boy in 1970s Santa Barbara, was based on Mills’ own eccentric mom.

“I have no imagination, I guess,” said Mills, deadpan. “I’m more interested in people I know, people I see. I feel like my only hope for making a good movie is based on things I’ve seen myself and experienced and can uniquely report on.”

For now, that means fatherhood, including the day-to-day joys and challenges and mess of it.

Parenting “knocks you sideways all the time,” said Mills. “It judo-flips and throws you to the mat. It’s humbling every day.”

Jessica Zack is a Bay Area freelance writer.