Review: Cooper Raiff & Lili Reinhart grow up in MUBI's 'Hal & Harper'

Stop me if you've heard this before: in a new half-hour series about underage anxiety, two adult actors play versions of themselves in public school, paired with younger co-stars who are the right age for the grade. 

No, this is not a revival of the late, great Hulu comedy Pen15. It's Hal & Harper, debuting this weekend on the MUBI streaming service. As Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle did on Pen15, Hal & Harper actors Cooper Raiff and Lili Reinhart dress up in the kind of clothes they haven't worn in real life in 20-odd years, and have to play scenes where they are much taller, and much older, than the kids in the scenes with them. 

Hal & Harper actually began life as a goofy web comedy series that Raiff made in college. The problem, he found, is that nobody who watched it thought it was funny. So he let the idea percolate in the back of his mind as he built an acclaimed film career as the writer/director/star of films like Cha Cha Real Smooth and Shithouse. Eventually, he realized that the idea — and the dynamic between the two title characters, siblings who have grown unusually close because of a family tragedy that left their father ill-prepared to raise them — would work much better as a drama with occasional jokes than as a sketch show(*).

(*) The final version is an extreme TV rarity: a scripted series that was independently financed and produced outside of the ecosystem of a studio, network, and/or streamer. Raiff made the thing dirt cheap, then struggled to find a buyer, because every streamer likes to run things that they either developed in-house, or acquired from a studio or international distributor with whom they already have a relationship. That's how MUBI, which is primarily film-focused, wound up with it after so many other outlets said no.   

There's some humor to be mined in seeing Raiff, a lanky performer with a full beard, struggling to play basketball against first graders who barely come up to his waist, or of Riverdale alum Reinhart being shunned by snotty third grade girls. But this final version of Hal & Harper largely uses the conceit to a different end. 

First, the scenes where Raiff's Hal and Reinhart's Harper are in elementary school are just one part of a show that primarily deals with them as young adults, and also features flashbacks to them as even younger kids (this time played by actual children) at the moment when their father (Mark Ruffalo) becomes incapable of taking proper care of them. So the series doesn't rely too much on the basic sight gag. Instead, the device is there to underscore the same point being made in the present-day action: the physical absence of their mother, and the emotional absence of their father, forced the duo to grow up way too fast, to feel like no one else in the world understood them, and to rely on each other far more than is healthy for even the most caring of siblings.   

While Raiff moves and acts in a childlike fashion in the flashback scenes, that's only to match the college senior version of Hal, who's never entirely matured past the kid version that we see. Reinhart, meanwhile, plays young Harper as if she's already an adult — reading Gabriel García Márquez during quiet time, sneaking cigarettes on the playground at recess — in a way that can make those sequences intensely sad. 

In one scene, the adult Harper sits on a couch while a sleeping Hal's head rests on her lap. She strokes his hair affectionately, while admitting to her dad, "I feel like I'm his wife sometimes." But she's also had to be Hal's mother, and fill three or four different roles for her dad, and it's more than should be placed on anyone. Reinhart is great in this: vulnerable, raw, dryly funny, and the emotional center of the whole thing. And when you consider that she plays a lot of scenes opposite either Ruffalo doing Ruffalo things, or the great Betty Gilpin (as their father's present-day girlfriend, whose pregnancy kicks off what little plot the series has), and Reinhart's always the one commanding the screen, it's an even more impressive achievement.  

It's clear that Raiff is a film guy coming to TV, in ways good and frustrating. Hal & Harper is definitely structured like a long movie (most episodes are around a half-hour, with the finale a shade over an hour), and at times it feels like the same emotional beats could be conveyed in a much tighter package. (You will be shocked to learn that the middle chapters are also the draggiest.) But the way he portrays the passage of time, and how he lets the show's different eras bleed into one another — so that sometimes, you're not entirely sure which version of Dad, or Harper, you're seeing until another character comes into frame — is absorbing and lovely. He makes elegant use of montages, offering minimal dialogue (often with more texting than speaking) while conveying a lot about where each character is emotionally. And even some parts that feel like they're dragging their feet — like the revelation of what exactly happened with the kids' mom — ultimately feel less like stalling than an attempt to underline how impossible it's been for all three of them to move past the moment when they found out. 

The added time also allows Raiff to more thoroughly sketch in the people outside the core group, including Harper's longtime girlfriend Jesse (Alyah Chanelle Scott), her office crush Audrey (Addison Timlin), and Hal's roommate Kalen (Christopher Meyer), who thinks of himself as Hal's best friend and doesn't understand that Hal is incapable of trusting anyone a third as much as he does Harper. 

By the time the super-sized finale rolls around, we understand these characters well in every era — and understand the ways that they've been locked into certain patterns for decades. So when the young Harper finally gets a moment to act her age, it's devastating. And then when things start to look up for her, Hal, and their dad in the present, it feels all the more satisfying.  

Though Pen15 started out as an extended comedy sketch, it figured out quickly that it could tell genuine, poignant stories of childhood and adolescence, even if its girls were being played by grown-ass women. Hal & Harper starts in that more serious place, and does some powerful things there. 

Raiff's friends who told him the web comedy version wasn't funny did him a big favor, it turns out. 

The first two episodes of Hal & Harper debut October 19 on MUBI, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I've seen all eight. I can be reached at alan@alansepinwall.com