Harley Quinn Smith

Watch her opposite Jason Mewes in Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019). He is shouting, as he has for a quarter of a century, and she is not. Her Milly answers him with an eye-roll that could carry a sitcom and a speed that keeps up with him without joining in. She is playing the daughter of a man who is not allowed to admit he is her father, and she plays it brash, quick and unbothered, which is what a girl in that position would do. It is the one strand of the film that has been written rather than remembered, and she holds up her end of it.

The career so far is her father's. She was a toddler in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), turned up briefly in Jersey Girl (2004) and Clerks II (2006), took a larger part in Tusk (2014), and then, in Yoga Hosers (2016), got her first lead, opposite Lily-Rose Depp, in a film Kevin Smith wrote and directed. Milly followed in 2019 and came back in Clerks III (2022). Eight films together. Outside the family there is a small part as Froggie in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019) and a main role, Mallory Higgins, in the television series Cruel Summer (2021), neither of which we have reviewed and neither of which we will pretend to judge here.

What works, in the one performance we can speak about with any confidence, is her ease. We went in braced for nepotism and came out having liked her, which annoyed us slightly, because we had our sentence ready. The reason is plain: she does not push. Mewes plays Jay at full volume, and where a less sure actor would try to match him, she leans back, lets him do the work, then lands the look. The film gives Milly's friends one trait apiece and asks them to stretch it across a road trip; Smith is the only one of the four who looks as though she has more in reserve. She has said that when she acts, "I'm not myself at all. I like to completely leave myself behind and become my character," and there is something to it. Milly is not a director's daughter doing a favour; she is a character.

What does not work is harder to say, because we have seen so little of her that is not on her father's set, shot flat and cut loose. The criticism most often made of her is that the roles are overwhelmingly his, and it is fair, though it is a criticism of the career rather than the acting. A comedy written by a parent who has known you all your life is a soft place to land. Whether the timing survives a stranger's script, and whether the eye-roll has anything under it when the film is not in on the joke, we cannot yet tell you. We would like to. Her father can get a plain, unforced performance out of her, and so, we suspect, could someone else, if they asked.