★★★ (3 out of 4)
This is Bradley Cooper’s third film as a director. It’s not as shockingly good as the first two—“A Star is Born” and “Maestro”—showing a distressing drift toward sitcom tidiness. But “Is This Thing On?— now in theaters where midsize contenders go to die while their target audience stays home and waits for a streaming date—is no disaster either. This thing is really on when Cooper and his actors show a flair for observational humor and the broken places in the heart.
Cooper casts himself as wannabe actor Balls (I’m not making the name up), the best friend to the lead guy, played by Will Arnett. He’s Alex Novak, a finance douche, though we never see him working, who’s splitting up after 20 years by mutual agreement with his wife Tess (Laura Dern). No bitterness since they share custody of their 10-year-old sons, Jude (Calvin Knegten) and Felix (Blake Kane), known as Irish twins because they were born in the same year. Tess and the kids take the roomy suburban house and Alex makes do in a West Village apartment, also roomy by big-city standards.
So is this a movie about an amicable divorce? Sort of. That is until Alex decides to try standup. There’s a comedy club near his apartment and he can skip the cover charge, not that he needs to, by going on stage for Open Mike night. Which he does, rambling on about the good, bad and not-so-ugly of his divorce. It’s not comedy exactly, but more like therapy, getting out those feelings that might turn toxic if left to fester inside.
Do you see the problem here? It’s not the story, which is loosely based on John Bishop, a British pharmaceutical salesman who, with no standup experience, began performing and building a career while salvaging his marriage. Bishop has story credit on the script from Cooper, Arnett, and Mark Chappell, which adds to a lived-in feeling that comes in handy.
The problem is that Arnett is an actor with a working career in comedy. He’s immortal as Gob Bluth on “Arrested Development.” And Arnett works hard, too hard, to pretend he has no comic rhythms. We know Arnett can do this, no matter how he holds back, forcing him to act being bad. And as expert as Arnett is, his experience throws the movie off.
This thing is really on when Bradley Cooper and his actors slow a drift toward sitcom and show a real flair for observational humor and the broken places in the heart.
What if, say, Cooper had played Alex and made the awkwardness register better? Luckily, what we do get is Dern who steals the star spot in this movie by twisting cliches into something fresh and unexpected. When Tess accidentally happens to catch Alex’s act just when she’s Topic A in his routine, it’s a contrivance that would shame the crassest of sitcoms. Yet Dern runs with it, catching Tess’s reaction from shock to awe and all stops in between. She’s amazing.
Cooper gets the atmosphere right, casting real-life standups Chloe Radcliffe, Jordan Jensen, Dave Attell, and Reggie Conquest to show how the pros do it. But it’s when the script starts loading up on soap suds, trying to mend marriages—not just Alex and Tess, but Balls and his fragile bond with sharp-tongued wife Christine (Andra Day)—that credulity falters. Arnett and Dern give their all to Cooper’s film about standup comedy as therapy, but is it enough?
What works best in the film is how Alex through standup and Tess through coaching—she was once an Olympic volleyball champ—begin to discover themselves as individuals again. At these moments with Cooper working up close and personal with the hand-held camera intimacy provided by Matthew Libatique, that “Is This Thing On?” finds its own way into this marriage story and discovers the grace notes it’s been seeking all along. It’s worth the weight.