For someone best known as an actor, Bradley Cooper’s core interest as a filmmaker is perhaps unsurprising. Thus far, he has been entirely consumed by examinations of performance—first digging into a pop musician’s stratospheric career climb in A Star Is Born, then wrestling with Leonard Bernstein’s desire to reimagine classical music in Maestro. Both movies were hefty pieces of entertainment, filled with love, death, and grand human experiences. His newest, the fetching dramedy Is This Thing On?, has all that heady, arty stuff too. But Cooper has now dropped the wildly high stakes of his previous stories, to focus on someone audiences may find more recognizable: a regular guy telling jokes.
Instead of concerts held in ancient cathedrals or sold-out stadiums, Is This Thing On? follows its protagonist to the Comedy Cellar, the famed New York City institution. There, a listless, middle-aged salaryman named Alex (played by Will Arnett) rediscovers himself as a stand-up comic. Based ever so loosely on the true story of a British performer who stumbled into a new life as a club fixture, Cooper’s film is still about the ways that art and art-making can invigorate the soul and lay bare its dark truths. Only now, those realizations are being mumbled by the gravel-voiced Alex to a small crowd at an open-mic night.
In some ways, I appreciate the scaled-back approach. Cinemas have been lacking for these kinds of movies of late: stories about grown-ups working through their feelings, navigating interpersonal relationships, and at no point picking up a gun, encountering a demon, or doing battle with a supervillain or serial killer. The tension of Is This Thing On? simply revolves around whether Alex will make some emotional progress while he tells his punch lines, and if doing so will help him heal his rift with his wife, Tess (Laura Dern). In an awards season filled with human suffering, the premise is a refreshing downshift.
The tone reminded me most of the work of Cameron Crowe, a former collaborator of Cooper’s. Cooper starred in Crowe’s Aloha, one of the director’s later and more misbegotten films. Cooper obviously longs for that era of storytelling to return—nobody could lob a sincere, big-feelings dramedy over the plate better than Crowe (Say Anything, Singles, and Jerry Maguire). Is This Thing On?, in its strongest moments, brushes against those heights. Yet the movie is too scattered, switching haphazardly between Alex’s journey as a stand-up and his efforts to rebuild his marriage.
The stand-up-comedy section of the movie simplifies some matters. Perhaps it’s implausible that Alex gets to stumble onstage at one of America’s most celebrated comedy clubs, but just roll with it, for the sake of cinema. Cooper uses the clubs’ brick-wall backdrop and claustrophobic vibes to his advantage, taking a setting that looks familiar to even the most casual comedy fan and turning it into a hostile proving ground for Alex’s darkest, weirdest thoughts. A handful of real-life comedians (none of whom are household names) essentially play themselves, and they nudge Alex to be more daring. Cooper uses these established performers sparingly, to present a more honed version of what Alex is stumbling toward: material that’s more self-deprecating and personal than observational or political, recalling the confessional mode of today’s most popular comics.
Cooper keeps the camera in a tight close-up on Arnett’s face every time he performs, embracing the harsh intimacy of the stand-up form; the choice can be both appealing and distressing. More important, he never lets Alex get too good at delivering jokes; the character rises from doing awkward and stilted five-minute sets to mediocre 10-minute ones, achieving the level of a competent hobbyist at best. Any movie about comedians might prefer to lean on some rags-to-riches narrative or, in the social-media era, a convenient plot shortcut about “going viral.” Is This Thing On? avoids all of those pitfalls, and the Comedy Cellar (and other venues that Alex eventually visits) is used simply as a place for the character to build up some interiority.
Alex’s search inward speaks to the other side of the film, the relationship drama. Alex and Tess begin the story having agreed to a divorce, before reckoning with what led to it—and whether it was the right decision. Dern does great, heartfelt work as a mom and a former Olympic volleyball player who feels taken for granted by Alex. But Cooper (and his co-screenwriters, Arnett and Mark Chappell) have made the breakup so light on drama that the consequences are a little lacking. Is This Thing On?, in essence, is about two adults realizing they’ve forgotten to have a few big conversations. I do commend Cooper’s willingness to try something more prosaic with this occasionally sweet little tale. At times, though, Alex’s career journey makes me miss the gifted protagonists of Cooper’s previous films—and their many crescendoing triumphs and failures.
