Here’s a joke: a man walks into a bar and, to avoid paying a $15 cover, signs up for an open mic night. He’s in the midst of a divorce and a little high, a walking, middle-aged black rain cloud. He’s never done stand-up before. The punchline? He’s actually kinda good at it – rough around the edges, unpracticed, a little stiff but, under the glare of the spotlight, able to spin some of his pain into self-deprecating jokes and unforced laughs.
It helps immensely that this man is played by Will Arnett, the gravelly voiced comedian and former BoJack Horseman who excels at masculine sad-sacks with self-flagellating charm. Like Arnett the celebrity podcast host, Arnett’s Alex is self-deprecating, subtle, effortlessly if dryly funny – in other words, easy to root for, even in the very midlife crisis pursuit of stand-up comedy. That’s good news for Bradley Cooper’s latest directorial effort, Is This Thing On?, which, despite its foregrounding of discovering stand-up, is more a subtle, self-deprecating, ultimately endearing rom-com between two people who were married for 20 years.
Their split, at least, was amicable. Is This Thing On?, written by Cooper alongside Arnett and Mark Chappell, opens with Alex and Tess (an especially winsome Laura Dern) calling it quits with all the drama of brushing one’s teeth. Before they’ve even told their friends – primarily Cooper’s Arnie, a cartoonishly self-absorbed working actor, and his artist wife (Andra Day) – Alex has moved out of their suburban house and into a prototypically divorced dad apartment downtown, a gray place devoid of personality or much furniture. His still-married parents (Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds) meddle but refuse to take sides. The former couple split custody of their two 10-year-old sons, played with sharp comedic timing by Blake Kane and Calvin Knegten. Marriage Story this is not.
But the friendliness doesn’t make the quotidian struggles of separation any less painful. Is This Thing On? fast-tracks Tess and Alex’s confused stumbles into single life in one’s late 40s, while rewardingly slow-rolling the reasons for their split. It refreshingly devotes less focus to the much-ballyhooed experience of dating again or sleeping with someone new – though there is, of course, some of that – than the trickier, scarier work of discovering new hobbies and rediscovering oneself, of rebuilding identity and self-worth both post-split and in middle age. Tess, a former Olympic volleyball player whose lostness is buried under several layers of steely pride, experiments with coaching. Alex has comedy, which he convincingly explains to his children as the grown-up version of making up stories to get through.
The film is loosely based on the life of the British comedian John Bishop, who, like Alex, accidentally stumbled into stand-up mid-divorce by putting his name down to avoid paying cover. Unlike Bishop, who performed his first set to about seven people at an entry-level pub, Alex starts at New York’s famed Comedy Cellar – certainly no amateur’s hangout, though it does effectively serve as a love letter to the city’s thriving comedy scene and the people sick enough to process life on stage in front of other people (said with love, and appreciation for no excess painful bombing scenes). Interstitials between Alex and Tess’s strained co-parenting paint a rosy picture of comedian camaraderie, as Alex goes from accidental natural and student of the craft, with new friends played by real standup regulars Jordan Jenson, Reggie Conquest and Chloe Radcliffe (and, as themselves, Sam Jay and Dave Attell); Amy Sedaris plays a supportive booker.
Alex’s nascent love affair with the art of stand-up, one man’s process toward processing his raw feelings on stage, is so enjoyable that I found myself wishing to stay at the cellar longer; this community, at once caustic and supportive and all in love with the same thing, is far more convincing Tess and Alex’s mutual one, populated with the type of caricatures or exaggerated bits you might find in a standup routine (and, inexplicably, former NFL star Peyton Manning as a fellow mid-40s divorcee who looks, sounds and acts exactly like Peyton Manning). Cooper, who shares more than a passing resemblance with Arnett, is particularly distracting, if funny, as a comically over-serious creative who makes no sense with Day’s overbearing artist.
But these off notes fade into the background of Alex and Tess’s evolving dynamic – sometimes barbed and sometimes witty, always charged and, in the hands of Arnett and Dern, magnetic. Is This Thing On? picks up steam as the two begin to fall in love in ways they didn’t expect – with new hobbies, with new versions of themselves – and trip over the questions and hurt they bring up. Both actors believably bear the mark of this weird, unexpected, inexplicable period of transition – Dern is positively sprightly as Tess reconnects with an older version of herself, Arnett lumbering with the pain of new revelations, both jittery on the edge of something new in what becomes an absorbing portrait of a relationship in flux. Is This Thing On? starts with a punchline – sad divorced dad stumbles into a bar as a cry for help – and smartly works backward; like a great routine, beneath the jokes lurks something tender, grounded and real.
