Is This Thing On? is much more about a relationship than it is about comedy, which is probably a good thing, given how difficult it is to make movies about stand-up. Fictional comics on screen tend to skew toward being tortured truth-tellers or delusional sociopaths or both, but Alex Novak, played by Will Arnett, is neither. He’s a finance guy who recently split from his wife of 20 years, and who stumbles into an open mic night on a whim while trying to escape the silence of the one-bedroom Manhattan rental he lives in on his own. While he doesn’t bomb that spontaneous first attempt, he also doesn’t display the raw, Mrs. Maisel-like aptitude that leads to a manager chasing him down the street afterward wanting to make him a star. Alex just finds talking about his life to a crowd of strangers liberating, transmuting the painful things he’s been going through into stuff worthy of a few chuckles, like spinning straw into… if not gold, maybe pyrite. He was the funny member of his friend group once, and up there on stage, you can see him reconnecting with that aspect of himself, and figuring out how to turn it into a tool for performance.
The adventures of a newly single middle-aged man on the New York comedy scene would be pretty thin as far as subject matter goes, even when that man is played by Arnett, our most divorced comedian (Arnett co-wrote the screenplay). But Is This Thing On? is the third film to be directed by Bradley Cooper, who has a real flair for domestic drama. Inspired by the life of British comedian John Bishop, who didn’t begin pursuing stand-up full time until he was in his 40s, Is This Thing On? is more interested in Alex’s relationship with his wife, Tess (Laura Dern), a former Olympic volleyball player turned stay-at-home mom, than it is his career prospects. The Novaks’ marriage was on the rocks for a long time before they call it quits in an early scene, the split affable enough that they’re able to go to a dinner party afterward and pass themselves off as still together, only parting ways when Tess gets back on the train to Westchester. Though Tess and Alex agree that they should be apart, they struggle to articulate what happened between them, even as they assure their two ten-year-old sons that everything’s fine.
Stand-up, for Alex, provides a sense of community among the comedians who hang around the club he favors, but it’s also a means of hashing out what went wrong between them in front of a microphone. That gets interesting when Tess, out on a date for the first time since the split, happens to swing by a club on a night he’s performing. Whatever blockage was there is gone, and they’re free to be frank about how they’ve let one another down, as well as what they still love being in one another’s company. “I can’t believe you fucked someone,” Tess shrieks when they end up hanging out together again after that chance encounter, referring to the one-night stand Alex mentioned during his stand-up set. Her tone is neither accusatory nor vengeful (they were on a break) but a gratifying mix of messy, funny, and rueful. We’ve seen Arnett play variations on his character before, sardonic and self-deprecating. It’s Dern who’s the revelation as a woman who truly doesn’t know what she wants, and who is figuring it out in real time in a way that’s a delight to watch.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
As a filmmaker, Cooper’s now gone from the grand romance of his A Star Is Born remake to the stilted biopic Maestro to this more modest indie, a broad spectrum of offerings united by its interest in marriage. Is This Thing On? is a postmortem of a relationship that turns up some unexpected lingering signs of life after its two participants independently connect with things that bring them joy. There’s something thrillingly grown-up about the conversations that Alex and Tess have. They’ve gotten just enough distance from one another to see beyond their long shared history to the people they’ve become. Is This Thing On? is a less obvious fit for the New York Film Festival than Maestro, which played the fest two years ago — not because it isn’t artful, but because it’s such a crowdpleaser. Cooper appears in a supporting role as Alex’s constantly loaded actor friend Balls, allowing him to hoard all the biggest laughs, but he also has a real sense for how to move the camera and light a scene.
Throughout Alex’s first appearance on stage, he keeps the lens tight to Arnett’s face, allowing uncomfortable silences to hang while refusing to cut away to reactions in the audience. The point is not how Alex’s act is going over with the crowd, but how it’s affecting him, and it’s only when he’s almost done that we get the relief of a wider shot. The film is warm and generous to the people it puts on screen, and it never forgets that someone’s hobby can actually be their whole life, up there on a Greenwich Village stage trying to find themselves during five minutes at the mic.
