First Love (Hatsukoi)

 Takashi Miike's done just about every genre in his ridiculously prolific career, and quite a few of them have been Yakuza movies.
 First Love, from 2019, is one of his more restrained efforts - and by that, I mean restrained by his standards; It's still pretty nuts. It almost passes for a normal Yakuza movie most of the time, and a damn good one at that. A funny, twisty delight with some pretty damn memorable characters and scenes. So many cool little details and unexpected touches; Very highly recommended.

 As the title implies, the film's got two young lovers at its heart. Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a disaffected youth, a boxer who fights only because he's good at it, without joy or passion. His life is turned upside down when he gets diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor. Meanwhile, Yuri (Sakurako Konishi) was basically sold into sex slavery by her father, and she starts the movie with withdrawal-induced hallucinations of her dear old dad coming after her wearing only his underwear.

Hey, I think I played this part in one of the Yakuza games.

 And then there's the crime story. As the local Yakuza slowly lose ground to changing times and Chinese triads, Kaese (Shôta Sometani,) a mid-ranking officer, decides he's had enough and wants out of the family. His plan: Steal a bag of meth from a couple of goons, kill said goons, give the drugs to a crooked cop (Miike regular Nao Omori,) and frame the Triad. Meanwhile, he'll turn himself in for another crime and serve a few years. His hope is that by the time he's out, his family will have been wiped out by the Triad.
 Oh, and it just so happens that the goons that are marked for death are Yuri's pimps.

 Kaese's worked everything out well in advance, so it's especially funny when absolutely everything goes awry as soon as things get going. He manages to kill one of the goons, but ends up infuriating the dead man's girlfriend (Japanese personality Becky), who basically goes berserk and spends the rest of the movie in a hilariously unhinged quest for revenge. The movie's MVP.

 The crooked cop doesn't fare a lot better; He was supposed to pose as a John, take Yuri somewhere quiet and kill her. But Yuri, who's hallucinating as a result of going cold turkey, sees him as his father and asks a random passer-by to help* her.
 The random passer-by turns out to be Leo, still in a daze from learning he's got only a little time left to live. Acting on impulse, he punches the cop out cold, and leads Yuri away.

 And so the two have to run away from both the Yakuza and the Triads, who think Yuri has the drugs, while Kaese and the Cop try to eliminate them to erase their tracks. It's a contrived, but very effective setup, and it's milked for all it's worth.
 It's billed as a romance, but to be honest while the relationship between Leo and Yuri is very sweet, it's not a very romantic movie - Leo is too indrawn for overt romantic gestures, and Yuri too damaged. But they both watch out for each other and behave selflessly, and their blooming friendship/romance is pretty affecting.

 I should probably mention the soundtrack, which is wonderful - a very muscular sort of jazz that goes very well with the rest of the movie.

 Miike's always been a great director, and while this is not the showiest of his movies, he gets a lot of chances to shine. The gore is tame for Miike's standards but still pretty gruesome - one of the first scenes is of a headless corpse stumbling around like a headless chicken, while his head blinks confusedly an alley away. The action is also pretty great.
 Miike can't help but to let some of his usual weirdness and wicked sense of humor seep in, but it's mostly done within the boundaries of the world and story - most impactfully on a very funny, very cute scene that shows that sometimes laughter can really chase away your demons. But you also get someone rubbing meth into an open wound to get John-Wick-ian superpowers... so, you know, Miike stuff.
 He also seems to get bored by the end, and the movie dips a little into symbolism and even an animated interlude (which I suspect was done due to budget issues, not being able to work out a realistic out to the situation, or both.)
 But it's only a little, and it doesn't derail the whole thing. The earth doesn't explode in this one. The man's getting softer in his later years.

*: Taskete (help) is one of the few Japanese words I know, mostly because of Ryoshi Kurosawa's Pulse. When my son started to babble, I tried to teach it to him in hopes he would repeat it randomly.
 I figured if my son started repeating it in the vicinity of someone who had watched Pulse, that person would shit themselves. I have no idea if it worked, but I dearly hope it did.