A lonely girl befriends a man online with the same name as her deadbeat Dad in this heartfelt indie tale that recalls 00s nostalgia in both setting and form.
★★★☆☆
Bob Trevino Likes It, written and directed by Tracie Laymon, approaches the subject of loneliness and finding connection with earnestness. The film tells a simple but resonant story about finding delicate but powerful human connections in cyberspace. It’s the kind of simple indie story that fattened up the box office in the 2000s but has since been pushed to streaming. Bob Trevino premiered at the SXSW film festival last year and is currently getting the good old-fashioned theatrical push it deserves. The film opens with a small but powerful moment, when Lily (Barbie Ferreira, magnificent) hesitates on how to send a breakup text. It is the kind of scene we’ve seen before, only here Lily is extinguishing the most significant relationship in her life. Yet the most context the audience gets is not from the text that we see, but from the anguish on Lily’s face. Ferreira succeeds with the kind of lead role most twentysomethings either don’t get often or can elevate, and serves as one of the best performances of 2025.
The opening scene is a strong statement by the director that this little indie film won’t so much lean on the true story (Laymon’s own) that inspired it, as much as the actors expected to carry it. It is followed up by a scene of Lily pulling herself together in front of her disinterested father, the titular ‘Bob Trevino’ (French Stewart, edging toward his golden years), who is more focused on which retirement home compatriot he can set himself up with than the bundle of joy all grown up before him. When he presents her later on with an itemized list of every expense she cost him raising her, it is straight sitcom material that only a few actors like Stewart could pull off. But it also helps that Barbie, true to her name, projects so much positivity and warmth, you might forgive Bob for letting her blatant existential crisis go unnoticed.
Bob cuts Lily out of his life, and one night, trying to reconnect, she finds a man with the same name (John Leguizamo, her new Bob). They meet and develop a relationship. As far as the plot goes in this movie, that is the long and short of it, recalling the offbeat simplicity and character drama behind Little Miss Sunshine and the mumblecore films of the Duplass Brothers, with better performances and more care towards craft. Such simplicity with great performances goes a long way, but it doesn’t take the film as easily across its 102-minute finish line. To do so would require adding some depth to characters on the periphery, like Lily’s physically disabled patient (Lily’s a home care nurse) who she eventually develops a friendship with, or New Bob’s wife who is saddled with the film’s most interesting question of how to respond when your closest loved one starts spending a lot of time with a questionable new friend. It’s a question the film is not at all interested in answering. To do so would likely pull focus away from the broken relationship at the centre of the film, which exhausts itself after 80 minutes. However, within those 80 minutes, all 3 main characters do their finest dramatic career work in an unfussy, understated fashion. It has exactly the kind of performances a film like this needs to leave an impression in the viewer’s head in a cinematic landscape dominated by blockbusters and endless subscription feeds.
Leguizamo has excelled in his career playing lowlifes and scumbags in genre work in everything from Ice Age to John Wick so it’s easy when you see him to take him for granted or maybe even be annoyed by him. He is the voice of Bruno people don’t want to talk about in Encanto. In Bob Trevino, he relishes the opportunity to play an actual human being and all-around decent person. His performance reminds audiences why he has stuck around as an actor for the past 30 years. In the film’s most dramatically intense scene, Lily breaks down publicly immediately after Mr. Trevino clarifies that he is not in any way looking to supplement or replace Lily’s broken relationship with her father. And Lily’s embarrassing episode is the kind of thing that happens when meeting someone that might cause the other person to run the other way, but Leguizamo embeds his character with enough human decency and kindness in response, which makes Lily and Bob’s further relationship development believable. Leguizamo then proceeds to illuminate his character’s response by giving an incredible monologue about infant death syndrome that is so involving it makes you question why this wasn’t the story the filmmakers were telling.
Visually, the film embraces an intimate, realistic aesthetic that, beyond focusing on Ferreira’s wonderfully emotive facial expressions, produces several nice images like Lily waiting with her friend in the hallway outside a wake, or New Bob diligently working inside his trailer office filmed through a small outside window. Subtle production design choices—like the sparser look of Lily’s apartment compared to the welcoming clutter of Bob’s home—reinforce the film’s themes without needing dialogue to spell them out.
The film’s tone is gentle and bittersweet, and never undercuts its emotional stakes by overplaying for the sake of Hollywood. Bob Trevino as a Dad could believably be a lot worse in the mould of Frank Gallagher on TV’s Shameless, and that might even be more acceptable for audiences to be able to completely discard him. Yet Bob is at least transparent about his search for a new connection, even as the expense it has on his present family is expressed so plainly. A film such as this makes one grateful they found their new Bob in life, or never had an old Bob like this to deal with.
The Verdict
Bob Trevino Likes It is an expression of chosen bonds, resilience, and making do with the people we surround ourselves with, while acknowledging what a big difference taking small risks like meeting someone demands. It successfully recalls the late 2000s social where one click on a computer screen could easily make a difference in someone’s life, and for a time during the movies, one story about the spark of human connection was enough to get people to pay attention. Perhaps that’s still true today.
Words by Will Hume
Bob Trevino Likes It will be available on digital download from 26th May
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