For a real test of a great actor, make them try their hand at bad acting. Not a misjudged performance in a swing-and-a-miss movie type bad acting, but embodying the cringeworthy delusion of the untalented wannabe thesp. It’s an extremely hard register to get right, but it comes as little surprise that it’s a challenge that Julianne Moore, one of our very best actors, knocks out of the park in The Debut. As lonely housewife turned obsessive am-dram performer Mona Friedman she’s hilarious, tragic, and even genuinely unnerving, the explosive centre around which Jesse Eisenberg’s surprisingly surreal third feature revolves.
Mona is truly invisible in her own home life; her kids are nearly grown up and don’t notice her, she doesn’t seem to have any friends, and her checked out husband seems to just be constantly shitting, oblivious to anything his wife is up to. Wanting desperately to be seen, she tries out for a local production of a musical and, despite a rather unimpressive audition, ends up with a small but crucial part mostly because there’s no one else to take it. This puts her on a collision course with Jerry (Paul Giamatti), the play’s director who, despite putting on an open-casting production in suburban New Jersey, is a ruthless believer in pushing his cast to their limits.
If you’ve ever seen the Simpsons ‘Streetcar Named Marge’ episode, you’ll be right at home here, all the way down to the brightly coloured heightened reality Eisenberg is working with. The logic here is halfway between full cartoon and the Kafka-esque unreality of Richard Ayoade’s Eisenberg-starring The Double – Jerry might be bringing JK Simmons-style Whiplash intensity to regional community theatre but he’s also probably the most normal character here, surrounded by quirky lunatics. This can cross the line in to being a bit irritating (aside from Halle Bailey bringing an innocent warmth to the play’s lead actress, I was not a fan of the campy ensemble here), but also allows for a lot of ridiculous, laugh out loud gags.
When The Debut is funny, it’s very funny, Moore getting a bunch of scenes in which to show off her most manic comic chops as Mona, buoyed by being *seen* for the first time, takes Jerry’s instruction to ‘make it real’ far too literally. She tries to actually live as a working-class handywoman to give depth to her apartment building superintendent character Miss Danielle and cannot stop arguing with her script, misunderstanding *emotional* truth to mean constant adherence to literal believability. Giamatti, meanwhile, gets some explosive scenes of his own, but earns most of his laughs from a brilliant series of increasingly exasperated wordless reactions to Mona.
They’re both superb, deserving of their current status as odds-on favourites to win their respective acting gongs at next year’s Oscars, each able to perfectly balance Eisenberg’s absurdist tone with deep and real grounding pains – a moment in which Mona describes her tragic childhood is an unforgettable mix of hilarious and miserable. There are a lot of moments like this in Eisenberg’s script (see also a running gag of Jerry cheerily describing brutal deaths for cast members in grisly detail as a motivating tool), matched by an enjoyably bizarre design philosophy where you can never quite tell what era we’re in and a lot of the real-life sets seem interchangeable with the musical’s facades.
And we must talk about that musical, Nosy Neighbours, a rom-com set in a New York apartment block. Its script and songs are entirely written by Eisenberg himself and it’s utterly convincing as a mid-tier production that would appeal to regional theatres but doesn’t have the oomph to make its way to actual Broadway or the West End. It’s good enough that Mona’s triumphs in finding her character feel meaningful, but also weak enough that her growing mania around it lands as very funny; this is hardly an actor losing themselves to Hamlet or Blanche DuBois.
Sometimes too silly for its own good, The Debut is mostly a very exciting and entertaining addition of a bunch of new strings to Eisenberg’s bow after two much more conventional actor-turned-director films, showing an always welcome willingness to inhabit strange, dreamlike spaces. Add to that one of the year’s most enjoyable star turns from Moore and you’ve got yourself an ode to local theatre that earns itself a very warm round of applause, if not quite a standing ovation.
