After a quasi-biography of Lady Gaga for his A Star Is Born and bringing the life of Leonard Bernstein to the screen with Maestro, whose story could inspire the next directorial effort from Bradley Cooper? Beethoven, maybe, if we’re sticking with classical, or perhaps someone inspired by the likes of Kurt Cobain? If you guessed Scouse comedian John Bishop, congratulations, you’re mad but correct. Cooper’s Is This Thing On moves his stylings away from music and into stand-up comedy, and it works shockingly well, making for a film about love and laughter in middle age that is just relentlessly funny and charming.
Though the story has been moved to the rather more cinematic location of New York, the Bishop inspiration comes from the core inciting incident. A middle-aged man, in this case melancholic finance guy Alex Novak (Will Arnett), is going through a divorce with his wife, ex-volleyball star Tess (Laura Dern), and, to avoid paying the $15 entry fee at a bar hosting a comedy night, he signs up to perform at the open mic. He does alright, and almost immediately falls in love with stand-up, rekindling his enjoyment of his own life in a way that might just put his marriage back together.
This first stand-up scene is just fantastic. It’s tense as all hell (seeing bad stand-up and/or being obliged to perform live comedy are both literal nightmares for me), and the wave of relief as it ends up going ok completely locks you into Alex’s headspace, helped immensely by Cooper’s unbreaking close-ups and Arnett’s wonderful performance. He’s never been given a leading role like this and he steps up to the plate brilliantly, funny and sad and totally real. Cooper, Arnett (who also gets a scripting credit), and co-writer Mark Chappell keep Is This Thing On very grounded, letting drama and laughs flow effortlessly without resorting to cliches.
This means no painful sequence of Alex completely bombing (he messes up a couple of gigs, but in salvageable ways), and even limited animosity between Alex and Tess, who still like each other even as they live separately, and are both great parents to their sons. If this all sounds like it might be a little too dramatically low key, it’s really not. Every character here is so boundlessly charming that simply spending time with them as they figure out where to go next in life is gripping in and of itself, and Arnett and Dern make for possibly the year’s best on-screen couple.
While the Tess role isn’t as exciting as the Alex one, with her return to her own passions less high-stakes than his, Dern is still luminous and gets plenty of her own gags. As it should be, Is This Thing On is a proper laugh-out-loud comedy, everyone getting big laughs from Alex and Tess to their kids to Alex’s bemused parents (nice little roles for Christine Ebersole and Ciaran Hinds), with the broadest stuff saved for Cooper himself.
He plays a jobbing actor and college friend of Alex and Tess who goes by the name of Balls, a man who really should have aged out of pretty much everything his life is about but refuses to. Always sporting new facial hair depending on the role he’s chasing, Balls and his wife Christine (Andra Day) do sometimes feel like they’ve been shipped in from another film, but their much louder presence ends up being a perfect tonal counterbalance, bringing a different kind of levity and energy without undercutting anything. On top of his love of New York and its comedy scene, Cooper here clearly wants to paint a broad and varied picture of handling middle age, and he’s assembled the perfect cast to do that – even the Novak family dogs are excellent, two older, ploddy hounds who are just lovely.
It would be nigh-on impossible not to have a great time with Is This Thing On, whether you have any interest in the world of stand-up or not. From a hilariously low key beginning all the way to a grandly musical ending, it’s just a super night out at the cinema; not revolutionary in its structure or too daring in its form, just a midlife romcom played to ultra-satisfying perfection.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 