Snagged by Apple TV+ for $15m and the winner of the prestigious US Dramatic Audience Award (which was given last year to the Best Picture Oscar winner CODA), Cha Cha Real Smooth was the unequivocal breakout of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Led by Raiff’s character, Andrew, it tells the story of a 22-year-old recent graduate who returns home from college to a barren wasteland of work opportunities and whiles away his days at a fast food joint. When he’s forced to chaperone his younger brother to a bar mitzvah, he discovers a new skill/side hustle, starting parties, and kicks off a close relationship with a lonely young mother named Domino and her autistic daughter.

“I wanted to explore the feelings of a 22-year-old out of college who really likes to start other people’s parties when he really should be starting his own, and a mom who didn’t get to have those [years],” Raiff says of the plot’s early iterations.

It’s a story that he’d been percolating for years, making mental notes of its scenes and themes. Then, in summer 2020, after his debut feature, the crudely titled but tender college rom-com Shithouse won over critics at SXSW, the idea for Cha Cha moved to the forefront of his mind.

At that time, Johnson was in Greece, shooting Netflix’s The Lost Daughter, but she had been impressed by Raiff’s debut, and was keen to speak to him about collaborating on his next feature. It is a rare thing for a star of Johnson’s calibre to take an interest in such an emergent director.

Surprisingly, Raiff wasn’t immediately convinced. “I was hesitant,” he says. “Will she be good for this? She’s quite young.” But after a late-night Zoom meeting with Johnson and her producing partner, Ms Ro Donnelly, an immediate connection formed. “I guess Dakota grew up so fast herself,” says Raiff. “We had chemistry right away. She reminded me so much of this character I was trying to piece together.”

Inspiration struck. The first draft of the script came together in two weeks “and we developed it from there”.

The level of control that Raiff gives his projects is mostly directional, ensuring that everybody is working towards the same end goal. How they – cinematographers, composers (including Ms Este Haim, who contributed to the score), costume designers – get there is a journey he knows they’ve been trained to take. And when it came to his dialogue, so sharp and alive that it feels unwritten, he gave his actors room to ad lib. On a few occasions, Johnson would highlight a line in a scene and say outright, “I don’t think Domino would say that.” Raiff obligingly let her explore her own alternatives.

“It’s important to be a good listener,” he says. “You want to have a hold [on things], but also leave room for people to make the work colourful. Ultimately, I have something I want to accomplish. I want to get these feelings across, but how I get there is all about what [his collaborators] are bringing.”

How would he describe those “feelings” for this film? Raiff pauses, as though he’s unsure how to verbalise them, knowing only that he’s felt them, too. The results are disparate, like different states of a character’s transformation. “Wistful. Sad. Joyful.”

What makes Raiff’s work so striking is the proximity he has to his own characters’ experiences. Movies about young men coming of age, usually a hotbed for crass humour, are respectful and refined through his eyes. It’s the antidote to the current status quo. “All we have are 40 and 50-year-olds making movies about college and high school,” he says, “and I don’t like when they use childhood or young adulthood as a playground.

“I feel this urgency to keep making things while I feel I haven’t let go of the person I was in college because I know at some point I will. My dream is to always make movies about something that I’m close to.”

In turn, that means that he’s making films like a man in his mid-twenties would: green and uninhibited. For now, Raiff sees that as an asset to his work. It’s scrappy, warm and imperfect; he’s growing as he goes. “That’s the best part of being young,” he says. “I feel the freedom to make mistakes. I hope that when I’m older I put a little more pressure on myself…”

But right now? “I just love the idea of someone being like, ‘It was directed by a 24-year-old’. That gives me room to try things out.”

Next up, he’s been handed the director’s reins of The Trashers, a comedy-drama based on the true story of a minor-league Connecticut hockey team run by a teenage boy. Then he’ll start work on the Amazon Prime Original Series Exciting Times, based on the hit book by Ms Naoise Dolan and produced by Bridgerton’s Ms Phoebe Dynevor, which he’s co-written and plans to partially direct.

With all this work on the table, does he feel like an adult yet? He hesitates. “I do and I don’t,” he says. “Being an adult is being able to take care of yourself and having a hold on your life and the relationships you have, having good boundaries.” He might be trusted to make movies by Hollywood heavyweights, but “accomplishing things has nothing to do with being a grown-up”. As the movie world lays praise upon its new star in waiting, Cooper Raiff is still figuring out the small stuff.