Five movies to binge if you loved ‘Don’t Say Good Luck’
It is so easy to tell when a coming-of-age movie is preparing to take a safe route; however, it’s safe to say that’s not the case with Don’t Say Good Luck. Sure, it starts in your familiar territory of school and adolescent ambitions, but at the same time, it changes the meaning of all of it without making sure that the film doesn’t go all misery-fest mode.
Don’t Say Good Luck starts with Sophie, who gets the lead in Waitress just as she finds out that her mother’s cancer has returned. Pretty brutal timing for a teenager. From there, the real question is not whether she can pull off the role. It is how on earth she is supposed to care about her own life when everything at home feels like a rug pulled out from under her.
But that is exactly where the film gets it right. Sophie is still allowed to want things for herself, and the film never calls that selfish. And frankly, why should they be?
If that balance worked for you, the next five films should slide onto your watchlist very easily.
Five movies to binge if you loved Don’t Say Good Luck:
All Together Now (Brett Haley, 2020)
If Sophie trying to keep performing was music to your ears, then in Don’t Say Good Luck, Amber will click with you almost immediately. She is musical and forever looking after everyone else, while casually neglecting to mention that she and her mum are living on a bus. Yes, let that digest. All the while, she is still holding onto this enormous dream of getting into Carnegie Mellon. You have to admire the nerve, really.
The film comes from Matthew Quick’s novel Sorta Like a Rock Star, though it takes a fair few liberties with the book. Auliʻi Cravalho has done a tremendous job not making Amber look like one of those perky film teenagers who make you want to feel bad for them for doing so much work. And then there is watching Carol Burnett, which is frankly a lovely little bonus. It is warmer than Don’t Say Good Luck, but it gets at the same awkward truth: life can take an unexpected route, but you can’t let your ambitions pack their bags.
Mixtape (Valerie Weiss, 2021)
Mixtape is a bit of a bummer, to be fair, because it’s the story of a little twelve-year-old living with her grandma, who lost her parents, and most of what she knows about them is basically a blank. Then you find a mixtape they made. Obviously, Beverly didn’t just put that back in a drawer. Instead, she decides to track down every song and work out what this cassette can tell her about them.
Because it is 1999, there is no Spotify shortcut either. You actually have to hunt for music. Imagine that. Thankfully, the film never gets too smug about the nostalgia. And we have Julie Bowen as the grandma, which is a little hard to digest, but she has executed her role perfectly. In the end, the cassette is what really gets you. It becomes Beverly’s way of speaking to people she can never actually meet.
Work It (Laura Terruso, 2020)
Right, enough crying for a minute. Work It keeps the school-performance trope but ditches most of the grief, which is probably exactly what you need if the rehearsal side of Don’t Say Good Luck was your favourite bit. And we have Sabrina Carpenter in the lead. How fun! She plays Quinn, a top student who realises her spotless academic record is not doing enough for her university application, so she decides to join the world of competitive dance despite having almost no natural rhythm. Sabrina Carpenter not having rhythm… now that’s hilarious.
Naturally, that goes about as smoothly as you would expect. She builds her own team and works out that being impressive on paper is not the same as actually caring about something. Welcome to Carpenter was already a singer when this came out, years before her pop career properly exploded, so there is a funny bit of hindsight in watching her play someone desperate to prove she has a creative side.
Irreplaceable You (Stephanie Laing, 2018)
Let’s now take the illness angle from Don’t Say Good Luck and flip it on its head. Irreplaceable You starts with Abbie and Sam, who have been together since they were kids and are finally planning their future when Abbie finds out she has terminal cancer. Yup. That’ll do it. Her response is to find Sam someone else to love after she is gone. Bonkers, obviously, but once you understand the panic behind it, it starts making a lot of sense.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Michiel Huisman lead the film, and it turns out it is much more openly sentimental than Don’t Say Good Luck, but the question underneath is just as uncomfortable. If you really love someone, do you hold on for as long as you can, or do you somehow prepare them to carry on without you?
The Half of It (Alice Wu, 2020)
And then there is The Half of It, which might look like the odd one out until you actually watch it. Ellie Chu is clever and makes extra cash by writing essays for other students when Paul asks her to help him woo Aster, so Ellie starts writing his love letters for him while also falling for Aster at the same time. Ooh, that’s a bit of a pickle.
Alice Wu borrows the setup from Cyrano de Bergerac, but she is far more interested in identity and friendship than in giving you the straight romantic payoff you expect. It was only Wu’s second feature, arriving sixteen years after Saving Face, which makes the film feel even more deliberate about what it wants to say. Like Don’t Say Good Luck, it gives teenagers the well-deserved emotional weight and, at no cost, pretends that they suddenly become wise adults just because life gets complicated.