Growing up While Directing Your Own Story

MOVIE REVIEW
Kids Like Me
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Genre: Documentary, Coming-of-Age
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 28m
Director(s): Cynthia Lowen, Jon Cohrs
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Tribeca Festival

RAVING REVIEW: Many documentaries about disability position themselves around education, inspiration, advocacy, or emotional endurance so aggressively that the people at the center begin to feel flattened into something like a symbol long before the audience gets to know them as people. KIDS LIKE ME avoids that because Cynthia Lowen and Jon Cohrs understand something simple but surprisingly rare. Oliver is not interesting because he has a disability. He’s interesting because he’s funny, obsessive, imaginative, dramatic, creative, stubborn, emotionally complicated, and consumed by the idea of making movies. That shapes the entire documentary in the best possible way.

At the center of KIDS LIKE ME is Oliver, a twelve-year-old murder mystery enthusiast with a wildly vivid imagination and a deep love for storytelling. Inspired by classic mysteries, fake blood, dramatic reveals, and suspense, he begins crafting his own murder mystery production with the help of family and friends. What starts as a charming, creative project gradually evolves into something larger as the documentary reveals the emotional, financial, and physical realities of Oliver’s daily life, never allowing those realities to define him.

Lowen and Cohrs never pretend Oliver’s life is free from struggle, medical uncertainty, frustration, or emotional difficulty. The documentary acknowledges the physical therapy, mounting medical costs, parental exhaustion, anxieties, and the complicated emotional territory surrounding adolescence and disability. At the same time, the film refuses to reduce Oliver to an object of sympathy. KIDS LIKE ME consistently prioritizes personality over diagnosis, which gives the documentary an honesty many projects fail to achieve.

Oliver completely carries the film. He has the kind of natural screen presence directors spend years trying to manufacture in fiction films. One moment, he’s passionately explaining the mechanics of a murder mystery with confidence; the next, he’s directing scenes with another level of seriousness; and then, suddenly, he’s revealing emotional vulnerabilities that cut through the documentary’s lighter tone in unexpectedly powerful ways. The film understands that childhood imagination can serve both as an escape and as a form of self-definition, particularly for kids navigating environments that constantly remind them of their perceived limitations.

KIDS LIKE ME never treats Oliver’s love of storytelling as a side hobby designed to make the documentary more accessible. Filmmaking becomes an extension of how he processes identity, fear, independence, friendship, and control over his own narrative.

Lowen and Cohrs handle that with impressive restraint. The documentary rarely forces emotional moments or overstates thematic conclusions. Instead, it allows Oliver’s family's interactions to reveal the emotional texture. His parents, Casey and Chad, emerge as loving, exhausted, supportive, and realistically human rather than idealized parents constructed purely for emotion. They’re constantly balancing encouragement with fear, responsibility with protection, and optimism with the realities of long-term caregiving. The film never sensationalizes that tension, which makes the family dynamic feel grounded.

As Oliver gets older, there’s an increasing awareness of difference creeping into his social and emotional life. KIDS LIKE ME approaches those moments delicately, allowing insecurities and frustrations to surface without framing them as tragedy. The film recognizes how painful the process of growing self-awareness can be during the preteen years, even under ordinary circumstances. For Oliver, that process carries layers that the documentary observes with empathy rather than sentimentality.

KIDS LIKE ME is frequently very funny, largely because Oliver himself is funny. His confidence, intensity, dramatic instincts, and commitment to storytelling create naturally entertaining moments throughout the film. The documentary allows those moments to exist without constantly steering them toward emotional messaging. That lighter feeling becomes important because it prevents the film from collapsing under the weight of its more serious themes.

KIDS LIKE ME remains so authentic because its foundation feels so personal and observational rather than manufactured for reaction. The filmmakers clearly care about Oliver as a person first, which keeps the film from slipping into exploitation or simplification. That distinction matters enormously in documentaries dealing with disability representation because so many projects unintentionally frame people as lessons for non-disabled audiences rather than individuals with their own beings.

The movie’s impact ultimately comes from its understanding of creativity as empowerment without pretending that creativity magically erases hardship. Oliver’s filmmaking doesn’t “fix” his circumstances, nor does the documentary suggest imagination alone can overcome systemic realities. Instead, KIDS LIKE ME argues something far more meaningful. Being able to create, collaborate, dream, direct, imagine, and tell your own story matters, especially in a world eager to define people by limitation first.

Oliver’s authorship. His excitement. His humor. His curiosity and his desire to create worlds larger than the expectations placed around him are what matter here. Lowen and Cohrs build the documentary around those qualities instead of around pity, which allows KIDS LIKE ME to become something warmer, funnier, and more honest than many documentaries attempting anything similar. The result is a deeply human coming-of-age portrait that understands how important it is not just to support children like Oliver, but actually to see them.

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[photo courtesy of LINLAY PRODUCTIONS, MERINO FILMS]

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