Movie Spotlight: Cart Pushers

There is a specific kind of numbness that comes from working retail through a heat wave, the kind where the intercom keeps announcing meat prices and buy-one-get-one deals over a soundtrack of quiet resignation. Cart Pushers opens inside that numbness, at a fictional Shop Fresh grocery store somewhere in the New Jersey suburbs, where a manager runs a customer service role-play drill on an employee who checked out weeks ago. The temperature keeps climbing through the film, seventy-five degrees pushing toward ninety-five, wildfire smoke drifting in from California and turning the air quality index into background noise nobody quite listens to. It is the setting for a coming-of-age story that refuses to stay tidy.

Vincent D’Alessandro wrote and directed the film, and he built it around an uncomfortable question: what happens when sincere feelings collide with something the audience knows, immediately, is wrong? Ray, played by Willem Ehrenfreund, retrieves shopping carts for a living and mostly fails at the “engagement” his manager keeps demanding of him. He falls for Jenessa (Madalynn Mathews) somewhere between the store aisles and a carnival date that plays like the emotional high point of the whole film. Then she tells him her age, and Ray says, out loud, “I could go to jail for this.” D’Alessandro does not flinch from the line. He built the whole movie to arrive at it.

A pressure cooker built from summer jobs

D’Alessandro drew Cart Pushers from his own history in hourly and retail work, the kind of job that ends up defining entire summers whether you want it to or not. “The film is compiled of pressure cooker exaggerations and what-ifs of very real places, observations, and experiences,” he said. None of it is a transcript of any single summer. The store intercom filling silence with cereal deals, the training scenes that treat customer service like scripture, all of it comes from somewhere real, filtered through exaggeration until it becomes its own thing.

The second film with Willem Ehrenfreund

Cart Pushers marks the second feature D’Alessandro and Ehrenfreund have made together, after Bottom Feeders. Ray asked for something different from the actor. “He’s down to clown, open to try anything, and won’t stop pushing himself until he feels we really cracked the scene,” D’Alessandro said of Ehrenfreund. Playing Ray goofily strait laced was, in D’Alessandro’s words, a severe departure from the “low-key swagger” Ehrenfreund brought to their first film together, and the range surprised him.

A kooky dark comedy that turns serious on you

Comedy, romance, and drama are all listed as genres for Cart Pushers, and the tone earns each one without settling into any of them for long. Store announcements for “Crack Muffins” and “Cran-Sanity Crunch Granola Bars” play straight against scenes of real human longing, and that friction was baked in from the beginning. “This was always a kooky dark comedy from the first draft of the screenplay,” D’Alessandro said. “I didn’t want it to take itself too seriously, until it absolutely had to.”

New Jersey in a heat wave

The forecast runs through the movie almost like its own subplot. For D’Alessandro, the heat was never just weather sitting in the background. “Heat always had and has a dizzying effect for me in real life. Decisions feel either forced or sluggish,” he said. He wanted that same dizziness under Ray’s decision to pull away from Jenessa, a decision made while his feelings for her stayed genuine, even as everything around him insisted those feelings were wrong.

A score from a fellow product of the suburbs

Ian McLaughlin composed the score for Cart Pushers, the second time he has written music for one of D’Alessandro’s films. His contribution runs deeper than background sound. “I can’t imagine the carnival scene working, in fact, it did not, without his score,” D’Alessandro said. McLaughlin, like D’Alessandro, grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, and that shared background comes through in music that carries both the bliss and the repetition of a suburban coming of age.

No easy verdict on Ray

The film does not ask viewers to land on a clean opinion of its lead. Ray is written to be pulled apart, sympathetic in one scene and indefensible in the next, sometimes within the same breath. “Ray was always intended to be a complicated character, one audiences would have to wrestle with rooting for,” D’Alessandro said. “I’d be overjoyed if audiences finish the movie having no hard lined opinion of him.”

What to know before you press play

D’Alessandro puts it plainly: “Cart Pushers is a black as tar comedic ode to the 2000s coming of age summer flicks and 90s slacker cinema that defined most of my summers growing up.” It wears those influences openly while building toward a moral complication most nostalgia pieces never touch.

Comedy

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Streaming now on Relay.