Robert Trevino (French Stewart) is the sort of dad who presents his adult daughter Lily (Barbie Ferreira) with an itemized list of all the expenses he’s incurred while raising her. “I’m not saying you owe me, I just wanted you to know what you cost me,” is his explanation. Robert Trevino is not a good father.
Nevertheless, Lily does all she can to be supportive, despite never receiving any emotional reciprocation. She bears it all—the casual cruelty, the unwarranted blame, the indulgent self-pity—with the patience of a particularly tolerant saint. After she accidentally ruins a potential romance of his by confusing one of his dates for a different one, therefore letting on to his girlfriend that he’s been seeing other women, Robert refuses to talk to his daughter again.
Lily, lacking the support network to make up for the loss of even the most terrible of fathers, desperately tries to reconnect. She finds Bob Trevino on Facebook, and although she swiftly realizes he is not her birth dad, she soon wishes that he were. This Bob (John Leguizamo) is a gentle construction manager, still grieving the loss of his infant son from years earlier, and feeling the resultant strain on his marriage. Lily needs a parental figure; Bob needs someone to parent. They give each other what they’ve been so lacking, forming the core relationship of Bob Trevino Likes It.
What stands out most about Tracie Laymon’s debut feature is how courageously, unapologetically earnest it is—that it was based on her own experiences only adds an extra level of vulnerability.
Perhaps the best example of the movie’s openhearted approach is the treatment of Bob’s wife, Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones). When she first hears about his talks with Lily, she is skeptical: “Honey, I think you’re being catfished.” One can see why she would think that way, when he’s just told her, “Some young woman friended me on the internet—I don’t even know how she found me!” Still, other movies have primed viewers to expect her to emerge as a secondary villain, there to put the brakes on the sweet friendship between Bob and Lily. That she is an obsessive scrapbooker, even entering national co*petitions, seems like easy ground for mockery.
And it’s ground that Laymon, to her infinite credit, leaves untrod. Bob’s wife doesn’t really understand his and Lily’s friendship, but she never gets in the way. Their marriage has been badly strained by their child’s death. Though neither thinks they have the capacity to give the other what they need anymore, they’re mutually supportive of the solitary avenues they explore to find the emotional nourishment they crave. They avoid deep discussions, but in lieu of them, they sit on the sofa together, and he listens as she explains her latest scrapbook. It’s dorky, and it’s sweet, and it’s sad, and it’s lovely—there’s a wonderful delicacy to the manner in which these characters are held by the camera, the screenplay, and Laymon’s tender direction.
There are two factors that stop this approach from tipping over into schmaltziness. The first is that Bob Trevino Likes It is often just plain goofy. The way Bob quietly, trepidatiously exclaims, “What the hell?” to himself upon receiving a solitary Facebook notification is both very revealing as to his personality, and very funny. While a lot of the film’s events are underlined with sadness at how Lily has been treated her whole life, and at the grief that Bob continues to endure, the movie is great at showing this sadness coexisting with an offbeat sense of humor. No one in Bob Trevino Likes It is confident or smooth. No one really knows what they’re doing. Laymon embraces the awkwardness, finding lots to love in the fumbling good intentions of her characters, but also lots to (affectionately) laugh at. Even the awfulness of Robert yields chuckles, in his ridiculous glee at appearing to be a nice guy when he holds the door open for a couple of strangers (“See, that makes me look generous!” he proudly tells Lily), and in his typically stingy assessment of the dating process (“I’m so tired of paying to watch women eat!”).
The second element that prevents Bob Trevino Likes It from beco*ing a big mess of syrupy tears are the two central performances. As Bob, Leguizamo emits decency from every pore. His is a turn that centers around listening, and watching; trying to give the two women in his life—his decades-long partner, and this young woman who’s just turned up out of nowhere—what they need. He is an entirely good man, literally without flaws, and that should by all rights have made him the flattest of characters. Yet Leguizamo plays him with a genuine texture and a quiet pain that make him feel all too human.
He’s a perfect counterpart to Ferreira’s Lily. Ferreira has an extraordinarily expressive face that registers the slightest of changes in her internal weather. When she and Bob are first talking on Facebook, before they’ve ever met in real life, she tells him how her mom left when she was very young. He says how his own mom died years earlier, and he still misses her: “I bet you miss your mother too.” In one of Laymon’s many close-ups on Ferreira, her face registers the shock at being empathized with for once in her life, the unexpected happiness of having her feelings acknowledged and respected, and the sadness because she does miss her mom—all pretty much simultaneously. Though Laymon’s screenplay is generally deft and sensitive in all the right ways, there are two or three scenes that, on paper at least, should have veered into over-sentimental territory. Ferreira makes them work, because her raw displays of feeling are so convincing that they’re impossible to argue with.
That willingness, of both Ferreira and the movie, to co*mit to the truth of those feelings, to not hide behind the easy shield of irony, to run the risk of mawkishness without ever submitting, has a real bravery to it. It all makes Bob Trevino Likes It a deeply moving film, and a passionate, uplifting paean to the importance of found family.
Director: Tracie Laymon
Writer: Tracie Laymon
Starring: Barbie Ferreira, John Leguizamo, French Stewart, Rachel Bay Jones
Release Date: March 21, 2025