Review: Is This Thing On? puts a marriage in the comedy spotlight
Will Arnett convincingly plays a man who works out his failed marriage issues in front of a comedy open mic
If John Updike had been alive today, in his late 40s and had a passing interest in stand-up comedy, he might have come up with something like Is This Thing On? (Rating: ✭✭✭), Bradley Cooper’s latest movie about the messy intersection of art, love and life.
Suburban couple Alex and Tess Novak (Will Arnett and Laura Dern) mutually agree to separate, but hold off on telling their two sons, as well as their closest friends. One night, the slightly stoned Alex — who has his own apartment in downtown Manhattan — happens upon an open mic night at a comedy club and, rather than pay the $15 cover, signs up to perform.
What’s in his impromptu act? His conflicted, ambivalent feelings about his disintegrating marriage, of course. He gets a few laughs. Encouraged, he returns. And while news of the Novaks’ split eventually gets out, telling jokes becomes Alex’s secret way to both process what he’s going through and find some sort of excitement he no longer feels in his life.
Loosely inspired by the real-life story of Brit John Bishop, the writers (Cooper, Arnett and Mark Chappell) ground the script with gentle, authentic details about mid-life child-sharing and domestic arrangements.
Alex’s parents (Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds, both savvy scene-stealers) chip in on babysitting duties while displaying their own kind of workable codependent relationship. And there’s a beautifully observed scene in which the couple’s sons have had a lice scare at school and Alex is literally picking nits out of their heads at his apartment. (When Tess comes, she’s worried she has them too, and so he checks her scalp.)
Keep in mind that this is one of those lifestyle porn fantasias in which we never see Alex doing much work — he’s in finance, and can afford to quickly upgrade his car and live in a ginormous apartment. Tess, we later learn, was an Olympic-level volleyball player and has begun thinking about turning to coaching.
The comedy scenes, many shot at the Comedy Cellar, feature actual working comics (squint and you might see Sam Jay), and they’ve got a spontaneity and hand-held-camera energy that contrasts with the rest of the picture.
Comic relief of a different sort comes through friends Balls (Cooper) and Christine (Andra Day), another couple who’s going through relationship issues. Cooper has fun as a flaky understudy for a play who, when he discovers Alex is performing, says something interesting about being the “creative” one in their friend group — the one who pursued the artistic long-shot while the others played it safe.
It’s insights like these, and observations like how separated parents will try to make themselves look better than their spouse in front of their kids, that give the film its heart.
A few plot contrivances, and the absolute wasting of Arnett’s SmartLess co-host Sean Hayes (and his real-life husband Scott Icenogle) as another couple in the Novaks’ friend group, hobble the film a little. Also, why hire Amy Sedaris if you’re not going to let her be Amy Sedaris? And while David Bowie and Queen’s song “Under Pressure” works beautifully here in a climactic final moment, it’s hard to forget how poignantly it was used a few years ago in Aftersun.
But in the end, this is mostly a vehicle for some fine acting. I’ve always thought that beneath his flinty comic persona, Canadian Arnett had lots of dramatic potential, and he fully owns the big screen as a man who, as he eventually discovers, was unhappy in, but not necessarily with, his marriage. He’s convincing as a stand-up, too, although during certain scenes I’m not sure a downtown New York audience would be as indulgent and forgiving as it appears to be here.
He’s equally matched by Dern, who invests the underwritten Tess with lots of restless, contradictory feelings. The highlight of the film comes when she’s sitting next to no less than Peyton Manning and watching a stand-up comic. No disrespect to the comic, but what’s happening on her face is a lot more compelling than what’s occurring onstage.
Is This Thing On? has a limited Toronto release beginning Dec. 19, and opens in more theatres Jan. 9.