A school newspaper becomes the unlikely setting for first love in Chemical Hearts, a 2020 teen drama about two students pulled together by grief and by words.
What is Chemical Hearts about?
Henry Page has spent his high school years content to drift along without much ambition, until he's paired up to co-edit the school paper with Grace Town, a new transfer student who walks with a cane and carries herself like someone who has been through something Henry can't quite name. As they work together, Henry becomes fixated on figuring out what happened to her, while slowly falling for a person who isn't sure she has room left for anyone else. The film follows their relationship through the ordinary rituals of student journalism, awkward late-night phone calls, and the kind of raw honesty that teenagers rarely get credit for having, building toward Henry learning that understanding someone's pain doesn't mean he's entitled to fix it. Grace's own process of grief runs alongside Henry's growing feelings, and the two threads don't always move at the same speed.
About the cast
Lili Reinhart plays Grace with a deliberate stillness that keeps the character's backstory at arm's length for much of the runtime, while Austin Abrams carries the film's narration as Henry, a role built around noticing rather than acting. Sarah Jones, Bruce Altman, Adhir Kalyan, and Coral Peña fill out the supporting cast of teachers and classmates who orbit the two leads without ever quite pulling focus from their story.
Context & significance
Chemical Hearts is adapted from Krystal Sutherland's young-adult novel Our Chemical Hearts, and director Richard Tanne keeps the film's visual language tied closely to Henry's perspective as narrator, since much of the source material is told in his voice. Released in 2020, it sits in a lineage of coming-of-age romances that use a shared school project, in this case the newspaper, as the excuse for two very different people to be forced into each other's orbit. The film leans on voiceover and small, observational details rather than big plot turns to carry its emotional weight.
Watching Chemical Hearts on Ktime
Chemical Hearts streams on K-Time with a free account login, and both Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles are available for viewers who'd rather follow Henry and Grace's story in Farsi. K-Time's interface is designed around the Farsi-speaking diaspora, making it simple to switch between the dub and subtitle tracks depending on preference.