Emotionally Rich Bob Trevino Likes It Rises Above Dramedy Clichés

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There’s a tired yet truthful notion that, as per Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, “you can choose your friends but you sure can’t choose your family.” Tracie Laymon’s charming dramedy Bob Trevino Likes It challenges this very notion, showing that when the cards you are dealt are losing ones, it’s possible to change the deck.

Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira) has had a challenging few decades of life life thanks in major part to her doofus of a dad, Robert (French Stewart). Lily helps provide care to her acerbic yet kindhearted client/friend named Jeanie (Lolo Spencer), but it’s the constant neediness, financial drain, and psychological digs from her narcissistic dad that are wringing out the last drops of patience and kindness.

Eventually having enough, Lily abruptly cuts off her dad from her life, pursuing a parentless life freed from such constant negativity. In a moment of emotional vulnerability and wanting to check in on her father’s situation, she searches on Facebook and happens upon a different Bob Trevino (John Leguizamo), this one a warm hearted, childless construction worker with whom she ends up having an unlikely connection.

This new, improved model of father figure is far more emotionally available and skillful, and soon Lily migrates from mere online connection to real life interaction with this surrogate Bob. Warmly and effectively realized by Leguizamo, the veteran actor deftly manages to provide what should be an almost slapstick situation with a genuine sense of kindness and pathos. A construction supervisor by trade, he’s unable to put the pieces of his own life back together after the death of a child many years before. While his wife Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones) pores herself into scrapbooking as a way to commemorate the life taken too soon, the taciturn Bob has no such outlet until he unexpectedly finds a connection with another Trevino in cyberspace.

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The film, where two broken yet kindly individuals find within each other acts that elevate their emotional mood, is surprisingly effective and truthful. Much of this is due to the strong performances, especially by the two leads that never succumb to being maudlin or obvious even when the situation edges towards the farcical. With more than a small dose of autobiographical truthfulness based on the writer/director’s own life, Tracie Laymon manages to inject the right dose of verisimilitude while still adhering to the well-worn conventions of American indie festival films.

The world has got a bit darker since the debut of Bob Trevino Likes It at South By South West just over a year ago, and so its message of finding familial connections during times of uncertainty and absence feels all that more satisfying. Although the emotional swings are broad, and the characterizations skating close to two-dimensionality, every time the film veers toward the overt or predictable it manages to provide subtle, satisfying shades that elevate things further.

Small acts of validation take on profound aspects, where the almost trivial behavior of liking a childhood photo serves for the lonely and emotionally neglected Lily as an almost alternate universe, where her newly minted Bob shows what a caring parent could have provided all these years.

At the same time, of course, Lily is filling emotional holes that Bob has long tried to ignore, focusing on his work ensuring workplace safety while neglecting the crumbling nature of his own emotional state. Again, the metaphor is overt, bordering on the trite, yet somehow it all blends together to become something warm and rich rather than cloying and saccharine.

Even the way the film turns at the end is truthful and, surprisingly, avoiding the sense of being manipulative or inevitable. The emotional swings between high and low are earned, with the secondary characters drawn with a welcome richness that further makes the central pair’s plight that much more revealing.

Shot with a warm palate, we enter the quotidian world of all these Trevinos with little in the way of barriers, given a filter-free look at their lives and the way each manages to make the other just a little bit better. The end result of Bob Trevino Likes It is a brisk, likeable film with characters that feel both real and literary, clichéd yet comfortingly convincing. It’s this challenging balance that makes Laymon’s film that much more satisfying, proving that when open to the possibilities of a good story well told even the most jaded audience member can be swayed by actions of kindness and compassion.

Director: Tracie Laymon
Writer: Tracie Laymon
Stars: Barbie Ferreira, John Leguizamo, French Stewart
Release date: March 21, 2025

Jason Gorber is a Toronto based film Critic and Journalist, Editor-in-Chief at That Shelf, the movie critic for CBC’s Metro Morning, and others. He is a member of the Toronto Film Critics Association and voter for the Critics Choice Awards Association. He also knows for a fact that CASINO is Scorsese’s masterpiece, and has a cat named Zissou.