“Bob Trevino Likes It” is an example of what some people have called “Nicecore,” meaning a work of art that stresses kindness, generosity, empathy and other positive behaviors, and doesn’t undercut it with irony or cynicism. The main character, Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira), is a 25-year-old home care nurse whose father Bob (French Stewart) is a raging narcissist, the kind of guy who sits across from his daughter at lunch as she spills her heartbreak and barely looks up from the iPhone he’s using to determine which blonde from his senior community to date next. Lily’s mother, an addict, deserted the family when Lily was very young, and even though her dad stepped up, he openly resented Lily and treated her as more of a burden than a daughter.
Then the two have a fight and Bob decides to cut Lily out of his life, even blocking her on Facebook. When Lily, who thinks her dad simply unfriended her, tries to reconnect with him on the app, she types “Bob Trevino” into the search bar and comes up with several matches that aren’t her father and one that has no avatar. That’s the one that she sends a new friend request to. It turns out to be a different Bob Trevino, who is played by John Leguizamo and turns out to be the sort of person Lily always wanted to have as a dad: kind, responsive, a great listener, wise, honest, a fan of corny jokes, and the sort of parent who reflexively “likes” every social media post she puts up.
Their first in-person meeting is supposed to happen at a diner, but Lily’s client’s toilet overflows and she impulsively asks the new Bob to help her fix it. Not only does he show up quickly and solve the problem, he takes her to a hardware store to shop for necessities that her biological father never told her she needed.
You’re probably reading this thinking, “I wish life were like this.” I was thinking the exact same thing all through “Bob Trevino Likes It” because I didn’t read the press notes before the screening (I generally avoid doing that because I like to have as fresh a response as possible). As it turns out, the film’s writer and director, Tracie Laymon, is telling a strange but true story that happened to her but changing some of the key details because, as she explained at a SXSW screening, she didn’t want to get sued by her biological father.