It is finally summer after a failing school year for Rodri (Adrián Baena) and the youth is excited to be reunited with his friends.  The gang is ready for an adventure as they plan to set up a mountain to find a flower fabled to have healing properties when it is harvested at sunrise on the first day of Midsummer.  

Live is Life is an adolescent odyssey directed by Dani de la Torre from a script by Albert Espinosa and released by Netflix in the United States.  Set in the ’80s, the Spanish-language film draws instant connections to Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986), an Ur text of sorts for coming-of-age stories revolving around platonic male bonding, and the comparison is not totally without merit.  While the object at the heart of the film could not be more different – a magic flower and a dead girl – both films find their young cast grappling with real-world issues that are slowly sapping away the magic of childhood from their lives, and unbeknownst to them at the time, they are sharing their last great adventure together.   

The film is framed around Rodri, a floppy-haired, goofy grinned, heart of gold character who continually feels like his best is not good enough and that discouragement creeps in and holds him back from even trying to unlock his own potential.  His loyalty to his family and friends is clear, driven home metaphorically by his skill with a boomerang, and while he may seem a bit aimless at times, it is a testament to Espinosa’s script that Rodri does not just fade into the background.  As the film unfolds and the dynamic of the friendships are explored and defined, Rodri, it can be argued, has it pretty good compared to his cohorts.  It is through the shared solidarity of the group, the vulnerability that Baena brings to the performance, and Rodri’s dedication to his friends and family that prevent him from being just a whiny kid who is not happy with what he’s got.  This is a boy who wants to be good – a good son, a good friend, a good student – but everything he does seems to set him back further from his goals, and while his struggles might not be as bold as those of his friends, he brings a sense of perseverance to the group which inspires them whether they realize it or not.  Rodri might not have the most fleshed-out role on the page, but Baena and de la Torre brought a winning character to the screen from Espinosa’s pages. 

Live is Life utilizes a bit of dual leadership in the gang; Rodri because he is our entry point into the friendship and Suso (David Rodríguez), who was forced into the role of man of the house after a fall from a roof had landed his father into an ongoing coma.  The trip is Suso’s idea, clinging to the hope that this legend holds true, and that the flower can be used to help cure his father.  Forced to be all grown up and at such a young age, the gang often looks to Suso for guidance as he already has the experience and responsibility of assisting his father, and now working to complete those open contracts.  Suso serves as a bit of a compass for the boys, a symbol of where they are heading in their own lives, but he does it all with grace a humility as there is not an ounce of arrogance within him.  Like they will all come to realize, some sooner than others, that their dreams do not always align with reality and Suso had to graft on an incredible amount of maturity at a young age, so it makes those moments when his playful boyish nature is able to shine through all the more special, and at times tragic.    

The film also explores maturity through another lens with twins Álvaro (Juan del Pozo) and Maza (Raúl del Pozo).  Álvaro, it is revealed early on, is fighting an aggressive cancer and this dynamic allows the film to explore two sides of grief and how the desire to be strong and to respect the gravity of the situation is sometimes at odds with finding whatever silver lining you can grasp on to.  There is a scene towards the middle of the film that finds the two brothers coming to a head in how they are handling Álvaro’s diagnosis and the intense emotional outburst that comes as the two brothers confront each other about how they are responding to the news is one of the most incredible things about Live is Life.  It is unafraid to push these characters to their emotional breaking points, and as a credit to the ensemble cast and their director, they all achieve authentic performances across the board.  It also needs to be stated here that, while the film and the script oscillate from moments of pure joy to harrowing confrontation, it sometimes lacks the connective material to make it feel like a fully unified piece.  The individual moments are all expertly crafted and tenderly captured, but it feels very episodic, and the beats do not always flow effortlessly.  The script hits its payoffs way too quickly so that the film lacks any longer running throughlines outside of the search for the flower. 

Rounding out the crew is Garriga (Javier Casellas), and to be reductive he fills the Vern role played by Jerry O’Connell in the Stephen King adaptation.  Much like in Stand by Me, while Vern and Garriga are used to help generate some laughs, their respective films are not exceptionally mean to them, either. In Live is Life, Garriga is the rich kid of the group, one who, while his friends will often joke that he gets everything that he wants, there is one thing his parents cannot buy him and that is popularity, or any real sense of social belonging, at school. Given the scope of the issues explored by the other characters, it appears that Garriga is given the short end of the stick as his main desire is to be noticed by a popular girl in his class who did not exactly invite him to her house party, but she mentioned it so that must count for something! Garriga is also a tough character to fit into the film because his arc is not one that can be discovered and dissected as the boys make their journey up the mountain together, but it requires a detour from their plan, and as such, it derails the flow of the narrative, too. The script feels off and a little unsure of itself here. It lingers at the party so that the arc is given the closure and necessity it needs, but by staying so long away from the mountain, it feels very out of place from the rest of the film. 

The other outlying aspect of the film is the antagonist biker gang, the Sioux, a mulleted motorcycle crew led by a character only credited as Jefe (Jon López). They are the resident troublemakers of the Galician town where Live is Life unfolds, and they have their sights set on Rodri and his crew from the beginning for reasons largely unknown. As the Sioux continue their reign of terror over the boys, it becomes a battle fueled by retaliation, but the catalyst is so vague and the characters are mostly nameless, that they really do not serve much of a purpose in the overall narrative. Like with Garriga, the conclusion of the Sioux arc is satisfying, but with how nuanced Rodri and his friends’ stories are, this stands out as a very cumbersome element in an otherwise meticulous script. 

Live is Life is a hidden gem of a film released into the algorithm with no fanfare. It borrows heavily from the litany of films that fill the wide-ranging coming-of-age genre, so while from afar many things may seem familiar, actually settling in and spending the 109 minutes with Rodri and his pals while they traverse the wild landscapes of their mountain home as well as adolescence, will open a unique world to the audience as these boys struggle to find a harmony within themselves. As the joke goes, maybe the real magic flower was the friends we made along the way, Live is Life is unabashedly about the relationships these teens share with each other, but it is so much more than that. Its sun-kissed montages of the boys at play juxtaposed with situations that find them all at their absolute lowest only to be brought back up speak to us from the other side of the screen, like an echo, like a memory, of a time in our own lives when the world seemed at once incredibly close and impossibly large.