To this introverted writer, there are few prospects scarier than appearing on a stage and trying to make people laugh.
Alex Novak, Will Arnett’s newly separated father of two in Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, whose day job, we are told simply, is “finance,” might have shared such trepidation at one time. But when he shuffles onto the stage of a comedy club’s open-mic night for the first time, early in the film, he no longer has any effs to give. He’s just consumed half a pot cookie and bade farewell to his wife, Tess (Laura Dern), after an evening with friends in which they pretended their union was still hanging on, if at least by a thread.
To say that Alex approaches the stage unprepared to tell jokes is an understatement; he puts his name on the list simply to avoid paying the venue’s $15 cover. (The movie is loosely based on a similar gambit that paid off for English ex-footballer John Bishop, at the time navigating his own divorce proceedings circa 2000.) The atmosphere in the room is as dead silent as the back of a hearse, and nothing happens for an obscene portion of his five minutes. Eventually, through the pregnant pauses, he speaks about his marital woes and his 26 years of history with Tess, discovering an embryo of a joke every now and then, but mostly using the stage as a talk therapy session.
The audience is remarkably, perhaps even implausibly, supportive. From Punchline to Funny People, struggling comedians in movies have long had to survive the pitiless overtures of hecklers as a rite of passage in a Darwinian profession. Alex, despite his onstage stumbles and digressions and on-the-job learning, confronts nary a peep in Is This Thing On?, the clubgoers quiet as church mice.
This should have bothered me more, but I chalk it up to the director’s Pollyannaish belief in show business’ redemptive qualities. The entertainment industry has been Cooper’s recurring muse across projects as otherwise varied as A Star is Born and Maestro, and in Is This Thing On?, the comedy stage is never not a safe space. Arnett himself is described by his fellow emerging comics as an innocent, as opposed to a naïf, and the same might be said of Cooper, who clears the way for an easier Road to Damascus for Will and Tess.
But gosh darn it, I’m fine with it. Whether onstage or not, Arnett, in perhaps the meatiest role of his career, has a way of disarming us — of lowering our critical faculties so that we’re all riding Alex’s enlightenment arc. Is This Thing On? is earnest and good-hearted, and it checks a lot of boxes for what many viewers want from a Christmas Day release.
Cooper’s casting is uniformly superb, from Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds as Alex’s meddling mother and juice box-consuming father, both characters fleshed out in multiple dimensions despite scant screen time; to Cooper himself, inconspicuous under various configurations of facial hair as Alex’s best friend Balls, a marginal film and stage actor; to Andra Day, Balls’ long-suffering spouse, whose resentments toward Alex fester until both are forced to confront them.
Cooper and Arnett, along with Mark Chappell, wrote the script together, and it exudes naturalism, tenderness and a seeming openness to improvisation that Arnett and Dern embrace with an infectious chemistry.
Cooper also effectively captures the halts and starts of comedy’s growing pains. Alex doesn’t transform into John Mulaney by the end of the film, but he’s a better joke-teller by incremental degrees, and more importantly, he discovers a like-minded, supportive community in his fellow open-mikers. That it offers a potential lifeline back into Tess’s heart is the unexpected icing on the cake of this comedy of remarriage.
Is This Thing On? doesn’t break fresh ground, and it ultimately succumbs to a formula that’s more schematic than is necessary for a narrative whose woolier aspects are its most memorable. But it’s pretty much a mainstream romantic comedy at its best — the sort of films James L. Brooks and Nora Ephron directed in the ’80s and ’90s, where even the cut corners feel smoothed over with grace and humor. Is This Thing On? feels, indeed, 30 years past its time, and it’s all the better for it.
IS THIS THING ON? Director: Bradley Cooper; Cast: Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Bradley Cooper, Andra Day, Sean Hayes, Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds, Amy Sedaris, Peyton Manning; Distributor: Searchlight; Rated R; Now playing at most area theaters
