WILL ARNETT AND LAURA DERN IN IS THIS THING ON?

Standup as marriage therapy - then a new career

The premise I'd been hearing about for months. It's a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but so soul-satisfying and theatrically effective that, with the right actors - and this movie has plenty of them - it can't help working, after a somewhat rocky start. This is a movie that works well once it gets going. It's hard to hear, or care about, the pre-credits opening dialogue. A couple is amicably breaking up. Wandering lonely in the West Village, where Bob Dylan found folk venues to perform at in A Complete Unknown, the husband goes to a club for a drink and winds up signing on for the open mike to save the $15 cover. Staring at the mike, he begins to ramble about his couples woes quite haltingly. But the audience responds, and the little gig turns out to be a hoot and a high for him. It also morphs into the warmest kind of group therapy. He's hooked, and his style catches on. The magic of a midlife crisis leads a man vaguely in finance to consider a new career as a comic.

Despite a certain level of on-stage and off-stage theatricality, Is This Thing On? compared to Bradley Cooper's two previous features, the remake A Star Is Born and the Leonard Bernstein portrait Maestro is A relatively low-keyed chamber piece, more a four-finger exercise. Within its more limited sphere the movie is a success, but without quite the glamor or high points of the earlier films. Some, like Matt Zoller Seitz on Ebert.com, like it better than the others for just that reason, but A Star Is Born won over the most critics; my soft spot is Maestro for its European subtlety in a high culture sphere. But one can see Seitz's point. We're in a low-culture world here with rom-com truths and lots of F-words. It sprawls a bit too, with its over two hours slightly lacking in economy, but Cooper relaxes here, lets it all hang out.

If I, with little knack for plot-making, saw what comes next coming a mile away that's a sign how obvious it is. (Spoiler alert, anyway:) Alex doesn't tell his (now potentially ex-) wife about the new standup gig. She wanders into the club and sees him perform. She's impressed and turned on. They start getting it on again - surreptitiously. Their reconnection is kept under wraps for two reasons. It would "confuse" their young sons. But as he says in one of his performances, "I'm having an affair with my ex-wife." They want to keep it that way, fresh and rebranded.

Alex Novak (Will Arnett) is a big, masculine guy with a deep voice, so the unmanning effect of a midlife breakup from his wife Tess (Laura Dern) is softened. He also reads as a Bradley Cooper surrogate, for this is a film both cowritten (With Arnett and Mark Chappell, based on the experience of John Bishop) and directed by Cooper, a New York chamber piece. It partially premiered (as did Marty Supreme) at the New York Film Festival - also in London and Los Angeles. There's an air of Big Apple showbiz about it underlined by the skillful musical performance of their kids, shown off in a final sequence. They're naturally stage-ready too - as Tess, a former elite team athlete, now a high profile coach, is super-competitive. She even admits to Alex, in one of their relationship-redefining debates, always had to be the best parent, just because.

The film delivers its best, most engaging atmosphere at the clubs where Alex performs and among the new friends he makes, but tends to feel a bit male-centric, a man's picture. It comes to life at that first, halting standup performance. Alex is defined as "innocent." He starts out by saying "I'm breaking up with my wife. The way I know that is that I'm not living at home anymore. . ." The screenplay conveys that he discovers his performance can both entertain and be therapeutic.

Later, as he gets hooked and performs more self-consciously, Alex is seen talking to himself while in the kitchen, trying out ideas that will work on mike. He builds up notes, and gets upset when his sons find them and peek into them. They find a shtick we've already seen when he milks his upset over Tess sleeping with another man and how he fears the dude might be: 1. a radiologist, or 2. a surfer. What's a radiologist? one son asks. Later, there are glimpses of performances by Alex that vividly describe other stages: the scary experience of having sex with another woman after over twenty years of marital fidelity; the excitement of the rekindled sex life with the wife.

Alex's stand up lines report on and clarify - from his point of view, anyway - each successive stage of his present life, of Alex's changing relationship with Tess. These defining moments alternate with scenes of the recovering marriage (or the hot affair with an ex it has morphed into) and color provided of the club scene and Tess's complicated life - as she struggles with the long letdown of no longer being a sports star on the women's Olympic volleyball team and seeks a renewal as a coach.

The honeymoon has to be over and so the old complaints revisited moment comes, when Alex and Tess have a big argument about why there marriage was going wrong. At this point we're invested enough in them as characters to welcome the further development this provides. It's actually interesting to focus on their debate over which one of them it was who got depressed first and bummed out the other. But these discussions bog down eventually. This is not Scenes of a Marriage. and lacks both the profundity and the gloom of Bergman. It's best for its vivid, even if simplistic, capturing of the way a comedian can make fodder out of his own emotional life. This is essential material on modern comedy. Even Richard Pryor did it. He just did it more brilliantly than anyone else.

Cooper revels in his actors here and Arnett and Dern are equally committed and good but other cast members also shine, especially in depicting the comedy club world and other close friends like Tess's bestie Christine (Andra Day), who gives Alex intense life coaching. Christine's husband Balls (played by Bradley Cooper himself) is Alex's best friend, an actor chasing a cowboy role with an oblivious, self-involved personality who provides much of the film's comic relief. There is another moment when someone close unexpectedly sees Alex on mike and comments - his father, beautifully played in a low, subtle key by Ciarán Hinds.

Is This Thing On? 121 mins. premiered at New York, also London BFI and Los Angeles. Additional festival screenings took place at Woodstock, Mill Valley, the Hamptons, other US venues and Stockholm. It released theatrically in many countries early in the year. Limited US theatrical release Dec. 19, 2025. Watched at El Cerrito Rialto Jan. 9, 2026. Metacritic rating: 75%. (Maestro: 77%, A Star Is Born: 88%).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.