People love to complain about Bradley Cooper as both director and actor: He’s too ambitious, too thirsty for an Oscar. His movies strive for what’s often viewed as a rather boring sort of classiness. He wore a prosthetic nose to play Leonard Bernstein. The litany goes on, but you could argue that Cooper fills a niche few other filmmakers these days even consider. He wants to make adult movies that concern the things people care about, subjects that used to draw grown-up audiences to movie theaters. It might be a reimagining of a classic story, like A Star Is Born, or a nuanced biopic of a gifted, divisive figure like Maestro‘s Bernstein. Or it could just be a story about the way love can slip through your grasp despite your best efforts—or, worse, because you didn’t make the effort—like the modest but affecting comedy-drama Is This Thing On? However you feel about Cooper, he keeps making movies few others would bother to attempt, doing the work of being a grownup in a world where grownups have all but abandoned the movies.
Is This Thing On? begins with an ending. Will Arnett stars as Alex, who, as we learn in the movie’s opening scene, is splitting with his wife of more 20 years, Laura Dern’s Tess. The couple has two 10-year-old sons—not actual twins but Irish ones, as Alex will later point out—which only makes the split harder. Still, it seems necessary. Tess seems to be going through the motions of being kind to her husband, but when they’re spending time with friends, she can’t help flashing the occasional sharp glance. But at least she’s got some vitality. Alex just seems sapped and zonked, as if he can’t believe what’s happening but has neither the will nor the energy to stop it. You can see why Tess—whom we later learn is a onetime star athlete, a volleyball champ—might want to be free of this cardboard cutout of a man.
After a particularly trying evening, Alex puts Tess on the train to the couple’s huge suburban home outside New York City and wanders by a small bar on the way to his own rented city apartment. It looks inviting; there’s life inside. He thinks he’ll stop in for a drink. The bouncer stops him at the door and demands a $15 cover, unless he’s participating in the evening’s open-mic comedy event. Alex doesn’t feel like paying the cover—he claims he doesn’t even have the money—so he signs up to go onstage instead.
His routine isn’t even a routine; it’s more a dry recitation of the events that have recently upended his life. “I think I’m getting a divorce,” he says haltingly. “What tipped me off is that I’m living in an apartment on my own. And my wife and kids don’t live there.” It’s a weird soliloquy, but his wobbly timing makes it work. He’s certainly not a comedy guy—we’re told only that he works in finance—but the audience laughs, probably partly out of kindness, but also from recognition. What Alex recounts is the sort of thing that could happen to anyone who’s ever been in a relationship, or been kicked out of one.
Alex keeps going back to the club to perform; it becomes a catharsis for him, but he also finds a community there (they’re played by an assortment of performers including Amy Sedaris, Chloe Radcliffe, and Jordan Jensen), a group of people who take pleasure in turning the everyday stuff that aggravates us—or devastates us—into tangible placemarkers of life, things we can laugh about together.
It’s not just that Alex has become more confident; it’s more that he once again feels alive, plugged into something that matters, even beyond his family life, which clearly means the world to him. Tess, too, has lost touch with the person she used to be—because no one is the person they were yesterday, let alone 10 or 20 years ago. Is This Thing On? is the story of how these two find their way back to each other, as the perpetually evolving people they are.
That may not sound like enough to hang a movie on, and it’s true that Is This Thing On? is more a movie about undercurrents of feeling, rather than mad, rushing torrents. But then, isn’t that what middle age is largely about? Reconciling who you used to be with the mind and body you have now? Cooper is in tune with themes that used to be everyday fodder for movies in the 1990s and early 2000s: midlife breakups, the anguish of waking up every day next to a partner who doesn’t love you anymore, the feeling of having lost your spark the same way you forget where you left your reading glasses.
These are somewhat unexciting subjects for movies. But somehow they feel essential, too, and Is This Thing On? somehow works its own stealth magic. (The script was written by Cooper, Arnett, and Mark Chappell; it was inspired by the life of John Bishop, an English comedian.) Cooper has a supporting role in the picture: he plays Alex’s closest friend, a self-absorbed, underemployed actor named Balls. He too is part of a couple—his eye-rolling wife, Christine, is played by Andra Day—and their everyday exasperations are on full display. But their irritation with one another turns out to be their chief mode of communication, and it works. Sometimes that’s just the way it is with couples.
Cooper is wonderful in this role. Balls seems to care only about chasing his next gig—he’s overly excited about having landed a theatrical part as one of Jesus’ disciples—but he’s also messily at ease in his own chaotic life. Alex can’t be that person; he’s too hung up on doing everything right, though it turns out that he’s failed Tess in ways he hasn’t even realized. The performances Arnett and Dern give here have a quiet, prickly grace. They show what happens when two people, supposedly unified, somehow get lost in their own murky spheres of being. This is the sort of thing Cooper is interested in: how do two such people ever find their way back to the light in each other? It’s the kind of story that was made for the intimacy of the movie theater, and for the possibly lost tradition known as movie-date night. As ambitions go, that’s a pretty noble one.
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