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How Cooper Raiff bypassed the network scrum to keep vision of 'Hal & Harper.'

- STUART MILLER

COOPER Raiff and Lili Reinhart, also an executive producer, portray the titular siblings in "Hal & Harper."

Mubi

Hal is having trouble adjusting to first grade. At night, he confides in his sister, Harper, who's in the third grade. Harper, who often has to mother her baby brother, offers Hal some words of comfort... while sullenly smoking a cigarette.

Wait, what?

Well, here’s the thing about the siblings in Cooper Raiff’s new eight-episode series that debuted Sunday on the streaming service Mubi, “Hal & Harper”: Their mother died suddenly when the kids were 2 and 4, respectively, forcing both to grow up too fast while also getting emotionally stuck.

So, while we see glimpses of actual kids playing Hal and Harper before their family is decimated by death and depression, Raiff plays Hal both as a 22-year-old in the present and as a 7-year-old while Lili Reinhart plays Harper at 24 and 9. Those childhood versions contain glimmers of their adult selves (Harper also reads “One Hundred Years of Solitude” during recess) while the adult versions contain the children they still are.

The family portrait gains heartrending nuance when Raiff shows Hal and Harper’s dad (Mark Ruffalo), who plunged into a deep depression 20 years ago, which accelerated the trauma caused by their mother's sudden absence. In the present, Dad and his girlfriend Kate (Betty Gilpin) are selling the family home and about to have a baby, stirring up anew the cauldron of emotions for Dad and the kids.

"Hal and Harper are just flailing," says Raiff, who initially insisted to friends the show was not autobiographical, saying, "This is not my life."

Raiff says his girlfriend, Addison Timlin (who has a recurring role in the show), succinctly punctured the notion that he conjured these characters "out of thin air," by telling him the show is "about the pain that we forget we remember."