Will Arnett and Laura Dern do their best with subpar material, but Is This Thing On? is a misfire on nearly all levels.
“I think we need to call it.”
Former Olympic volleyball player Tess (Laura Dern) drops this bombshell at the start of Is This Thing On? to her soon-to-be ex-husband Alex (Will Arnett), and he just quietly accepts it. It’s a serious whiplash of a declaration that shatters what is supposed to be a moment of mundanity.
As one would expect, this quickly spurs Alex’s midlife crisis. But rather than dating inappropriately young women or buying an overpriced supercar, he randomly gets into stand-up comedy after wandering into the Comedy Cellar, all because he wanted a drink and didn’t want to pay the cover charge.
That is a fascinating premise, especially since it’s based on the life of comedian John Bishop, and Bradley Cooper has proven himself to be pretty damn good at the ‘examining relationships through a creative art form’ movie. Yet Is This Thing On? feels like the lacklustre debut movie I expected him to make instead of the brilliant A Star Is Born.
We quickly learn that Alex and Tess’s divorce is the chillest split we’ve probably ever seen in a Hollywood movie. There’s no fighting over assets or the kids; no one cheated; there’s no vicious fight or trauma that’s of any import, and it’s clear that the pair still love each other. I like that this is trying to be a divorce movie that isn’t about a fight!
There doesn’t need to be drama or acrimony (à la Marriage Story or Kramer vs. Kramer) to have a relationship movie be interesting. But the emotional specificity needs to be razor sharp for the whole thing to be sustained over 100 or so minutes. Is This Thing On? falls apart when you think about the material for longer than 30 seconds because the punchlines don’t hold up to any level of scrutiny. Case in point, why is Cooper’s best friend’s character named ‘Balls’?
On paper, stand-up comedy feels like the ideal engine to drive this movie’s idea of a middle-aged man trying to deal with his recent divorce. After all, it’s an art form that mines one’s personal life for material, hoping to connect with audiences while seeking some level of catharsis.
The first few scenes of Alex performing stand-up for the first time are some of the strongest in the movie. As he is coming up with jokes to tell the audience, the camera is held firmly on his face without any interruption or cut, and you can see the gears turning in his head. This isn’t a Marvelous Mrs. Maisel-esque discovery where he’s a one-in-a-million talent. Alex just finds talking about what’s going on in his life to strangers therapeutic.
Arnett is known for his deep voice, but watching his weary eyes and forehead tense up in trying find something – anything – to talk about is some subtle acting that he doesn’t get enough credit for. Unlike the sweeping operatic style of A Star Is Born and Maestro, Is This Thing On? is smaller in scale and far more intimate with close-ups aplenty throughout. Cooper wants us to get into each character’s head. It’s just a shame there’s nothing in their heads to grasp.
The stand-up stuff makes very little sense, both in how the New York comedy scene works and in how it all ties back into Alex’s character arc. We’re told time and time again that Alex was the funniest guy once, but all we ever see is him being a sad sack. From the moment he starts doing stand-up to the movie’s final moments, Alex is fundamentally the same person. There’s literally no journey to Alex being comic, or any sense of how it affects him emotionally. Comedy isn’t a trigger for greater things or pseudo-therapy of sorts; it was merely a side quest.
We just see Alex do his material while the crowds eat it up… and that’s it. Don’t get me wrong, Arnett is a great actor who is capable of being funny and a mope on the flip of a coin. But Alex is such a barely-there character that Arnett can only do so much to make him interesting. Marty Mauser is not.
Stand-up isn’t Cooper’s primary focus for Is This Thing On?, but given his meticulous preparation for his two previous movies, I just find it strange how unrealistic Alex’s journey as a comic is. There’s no way he doesn’t bomb at least a few times after his first positive experience, nor is it that easy to find open mics that are so welcoming of newbies.
But while I can look past the stand-up stuff, I can’t let the critical flaw with the movie’s central premise slide.
When Alex and Tess have what is intended to be the movie’s showstopping argument two-thirds in, their trading of barbs over who checked out of the marriage is somewhat interesting. But all this scene really accomplishes is catching me up on events and emotions that I didn’t see, rather than revealing anything insightful. Since Alex and Tess had already decided to divorce when the movie starts, I simply don’t care about the reasons why they split at this point. Again, telling rather than showing is doing so much heavy lifting.
The stand-up stuff and the relationship stuff ultimately don’t really work at any level, but there’s still some good scenes to be found in this damp squib of a movie, most of which involve the great Laura Dern.
Despite Tess constantly saying that she’s more than a former Olympic volleyball player, we don’t really see anything that tells us otherwise. But Dern somehow manages to make Tess a somewhat believable person in a movie filled with unrealistic people. The best moment is when Tess stumbles across Alex doing a stand-up set and realises his material is based on their marriage. Her scowl and eyebrows do far more work than any subpar line the script has to offer. Hell, I’m far more interested in a movie about Tess than what we got about Alex.
It feels fitting that the best moments of Is This Thing On? are the occasional one-off bit. But the sum of all these parts barely equates to something somewhat interesting, let alone a coherent movie. This material needs more workshopping before being performed in front of a crowd because the punchlines barely land with a whimper. If there was a cover charge, I’d save my money and go somewhere else instead.