Rico (Juan Collado) is 19 years old, lives with his Dominican mom and sister (Yohanna Florentino and Nathaly Navarro, respectively) in their Bronx apartment and has no grand plan beyond shilling bootleg cocktails on local beaches, and then getting drunk himself, and then waking and baking the next morning and doing it all over again. But when his 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo) tells him she’s pregnant, he is forced to grow up in a hurry. Well, let’s say it requires him to grow up in a hurry as writer/director Joel Alfonso Vargas’s low-budget indie takes place in that liminal space between realizing you need to grow up and, in fact, doing it. Rico wants to keep the baby if only to prove he’s not the man his father was, even if he keeps slipping into his father’s old habits, lurching between talking a big game about personal responsibility and then getting fired and coming home drunk, brought home in Collado’s oft-exasperated and occasionally exasperating performance demonstrating the supreme difficulty of metaphorically just managing to walk with one foot in front of the other. Those oscillating emotions are enhanced by the portrayal of Rico and his family, introduced screaming at one another before a quick cut shows them sharing a sweet moment, like the previous one never happened, illustrating in equal measure the pressures that go with living and very real love.
Vargas accentuates such emotional fluctuation with a visual strategy of static frames and long takes, evoking the movie as one carved from slice of life observation more than any kind of electric plotting, and just sort of letting moments both big and small play themselves out in what feels like real time. The basic elements are familiar, and Rico can even sometimes be a bear to hang around, though that makes you feel like everyone else in his orbit, wanting to shake him and tell him to get it together because just enough sweetness emerges to make you want to believe in him. And though the focus is on Rico, “Mad Bills” never loses sight of Destiny, who moves in with his family and then moves out, coming into her own even as Rico struggles to do the same. The end sneaks up on you. It’s neither happy nor sad, pitched in that uncertain space between, Rico and Destiny clutching one another’s hand in a way that made me think of, well, who else but Bruce Springsteen: “Well, cuddle up, angel, cuddle up, my little dove, and we’ll ride down, baby, into this tunnel of love.”