Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? opens with both a simple and incredibly complex question: is this thing over? Alex and Tess Novak (Will Arnett and Laura Dern) are at their wits’ end after decades of marriage. They love their ruffian boys, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that they hate their lives together. So the answer is easy: yes, it’s over. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
After inhaling a large weed cookie that Tess stole from a party, the couple accidentally (read: thematically) get separated, Alex stuck on the train platform as Tess rides off with a smile, neither concerned at all in their blissful high. Alex wanders into a comedy joint where the $15 cover is only avoidable if he’s performing in the open-mic night. As fate would have it, it turns out open-mic nights are a great way for emotionally closeted dads to express their feelings, especially when they happen upon the most generous audiences of all time, a detail Cooper could’ve curtailed for more realistic effect.
While Tess considers coaching the U.S. Olympic Volleyball team, going on dates with people like Peyton Manning to feel out her post-career coach life, Alex falls fast and hard for stand-up and keeps it to himself. He’s immediately accepted by everyone he meets in the comedy world, loved by the venue manager (longtime friend, collaborator, and Princess Carolyn, Amy Sedaris), and adored by crowds. Given how historically difficult stand-up is to break into––combined with how unfunny and unpolished Alex’s sets are––the overly optimistic characterization of the scene garners a feature-length eye roll. But if you can get past some of Cooper’s cringier directorial tendencies, there’s a delightful film buried herein with a gentle touch and genuine appetite to exorcise loneliness from its viewers.
Alex’s rambling tight fives are less of a comedy show and more a therapy session with the audience. He slips the occasional joke in like someone would mid-conversation, but otherwise he just tells the audience about his divorce, fumbling through stories about his ex-wife, living alone, sleeping with other people for the first time, and other relatable break-up topics. In Is This Thing On?, apparently that’s hottest style on the market. As Alex rises to the top of New York’s famed Comedy Cellar, he and Tess navigate the new version of their lives (often still together) and wonder openly about what’s next, sans screaming.
Cinema has a rich history of divorce and marital in-fighting––Scenes from a Marriage, Revolutionary Road, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Marriage Story. Like boxing films, the subgenre is teeming with knockdown, drag-out fights for the ages, the likes of which leave both corners battered, bruised, and drowning in existential crises. The War of the Roses and its recent remake occupy an even smaller substrate of cinema as films that make comedies out of the gut-wrenching scenario.
Not quite Roses, but nowhere near Scenes, Cooper’s approach to the film takes a lightly comedic, lightly dramatic prestige mumblecore angle, like Marriage Story without the fights or Baumbach flow. But Cooper establishes his own peculiar pace, and it’s one of the film’s greatest pleasures. In moments of stillness, the film often cuts to black, as if to end a chapter, and re-opens in stillness somewhere else, the quiet cuts both sudden and soft in their silence. Sometimes we re-open minutes later, other times weeks, with major events that we thought we’d get a taste of having already proceeded. Time passes in equally peculiar ways.
The actor-producer-writer-director (who penned the screenplay with Mark Chappell and real-life best bud Arnett) has helmed three films now. To Cooper’s credit, none of them have been alike. But none of them have been great, either. They all have memorable moments, impressive elements, but there’s a timidity and safeness to Cooper’s approach that keeps them from breaking through. Here it comes primarily in the form of stripped-down, unimaginative handheld camerawork that feels more derogatorily Sundance than what Cooper has already proven capable.
Still there’s been a tenderness to each of Cooper’s projects. Much like the airheaded western-bohemian (unsuccessful) actor he plays in Is This Thing On?, the first of his films he hasn’t led, there’s a contagious lovability that significantly reduces the negative impact of Cooper’s dad-like overindulgence. Take, for instance, a long shot in which friends beautifully sing “Amazing Grace” together as they gather like freshly emerged bed trolls at the breakfast table––its only purpose is to charm. Like A Star Is Born and Maestro, Is This Thing On? oscillates between scenes so out-of-touch they’re hard to watch and scenes so strong they pull the whole movie out of the trenches in one back-breaking lift.
The film ends up being hilarious, but minus some stand-up montages, the comedy doesn’t come from the stage. Between Andra Day, Christine Ebersole, Ciaran Hinds, Cooper, and Manning, the supporting cast is outrageous and perfectly planted. Cooper’s entrance, in particular, is one of the funniest moments of the year. He finds a fantastic balance between gentle drama and genuinely uproarious real-life moments that range from Sean Hayes parodying himself as a midnight snack monster (Smartless fans rejoice, the Arnett-Hayes Easter eggs are plentiful) to middle school boys sincerely lecturing their father on why it’s important to have goals. Throughout, Alex and Tess refuse to play the typical explosive divorce game, but we dip into their post-divorce depression regularly. They’re always on the verge of tears.
Cooper dwells in the Lonely Dad mood too much, lending the longer-lingering shots of Alex a self-pitying tone that’s more off-putting than it is empathy-inducing. It doesn’t help that some conversations fall prey to a lack of chemistry wrought by a clearly improvisational approach to scenework. If you can tell it’s improv and it’s not supposed to feel like improv, improvising isn’t the move. It has to render real, and this feels like they left the scaffolding up (in the form of awkward pauses) after building the structure of the scene.
As Arnett knows from real-world experience with ex-wife Amy Poehler, with whom he also has two boys, divorce either sets people free or brings them to rock bottom, and Cooper flirts with both here. How much of it is autobiographical––and whether Dern is supposed to be a Poehler type, or was written with Poehler in mind––remains to be seen. The film nevertheless provides a fascinating peek into a fiction that, at least once, wasn’t all that fictional.
Is This Thing On? premiered at the New York Film Festival and opens on December 19.
The post NYFF Review: Is This Thing On? Finds Bradley Cooper Making a Gentle Film About Marital Strife first appeared on The Film Stage.
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