Movie Review: Is This Thing On?
Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? is a more fascinating movie in Cooper’s filmography than it is a good movie. That isn’t to say the film is bad; it’s actually quite good. But the scale of the film, its subject, and how it is filmed compared to Cooper’s first two films is more interesting to think about.
Is This Thing On? is a midlife crisis dramedy. The film opens with Alex Novak (Will Arnett) and his wife Tess (Laura Dern) cordially deciding that their marriage is over while brushing their teeth. The casualness of this gives the idea that they’ve known it’s been over for a while, but someone finally said it out loud.
Flash forward a little bit. Alex now lives in a one-bedroom apartment alone, while Tess lives in their nice suburban home with their sons, who sleep at Alex’s from time to time. Alex is not in a good mental place, and one night, when looking for a drink and not wanting to pay the cover fee, he signs up to perform an open mic stand-up session, despite never having done stand-up before. While not loaded with jokes, the audience seems to get a kick out of Alex’s dry humor and the sadness in his life. This jumpstarts something in Alex, and he continues to do open mics and practice his stand-up, all while trying to navigate life and his relationship with Tess.
Will Arnett is superb as Alex, portraying a man who finds an outlet for his stress and anxieties with stand-up. I’ve never seen an Arnett performance like this before, but he doesn’t miss a note in his best cinematic performance to date. Dern is equally good as Alex’s ex-wife, and the two of them have effortless chemistry. They are surrounded by an excellent supporting cast of character actors, comedians, and Cooper himself, who plays a character named Balls.
Cooper balances humor and drama nicely. The stand-up sets are humorous, but the human drama is where the film really shines. Is This Thing On? looks at the messiness of marriage and divorce and how complicated it might be to lose the person you love the most in life. We also watch as Alex uses stand-up to cope with the sadness he is feeling about the divorce and learn to find a piece of himself that he had been missing for years. Cooper co-wrote the screenplay with Arnett and Mark Chappelle, and it is the best screenplay of Cooper’s career.
Cooper’s previous directorial efforts, 2018’s A Star is Born and 2023’s Maestro, are two of the more ambitious features to start a directing career. Both films are grand in scale and feature lavish sets and costumes, and focus on big characters with big issues. Is This Thing On? finds Cooper scaling everything back. It’s a more intimate story, and Cooper’s filmmaking emphasizes that. A lot of the shots are handheld, making it feel like we’re following Alex everywhere we go. Cooper also utilizes close-ups to emphasize some of the more uncomfortable and awkward moments, most notably when Alex tries out stand-up for the first time. It’s a complete zag aesthetically from what we saw from Cooper with his first two films and adds a new layer to his range as a director. Though it doesn’t reach the heights of A Star is Born or feels as ambitious as Maestro, Is This Thing On? feels like a movie that will only get more interesting the bigger Cooper’s filmography gets as a director. Will he ever make another movie like this again, or will it be an outlier in his filmography? Only time will tell, but Is This Thing On? will certainly require a revisit at some point during his career.
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