It’s the way you tell ’em.
Director Bradley Cooper continues his fascination with the internal machinery of the performer, trading the conductor’s podium and the empty adulation of stadium rock for the sticky, low-ceilinged romanticised reality of the New York comedy circuit. Is This Thing On? presents as a scruffy, middle-aged introspection, following Alex (Will Arnett) as he navigates the conscious decoupling of his marriage to Tess (Laura Dern) and while Cooper manages to coax a career-best performance from Arnett, the result is a work that feels uncomfortably like a conversation between industry insiders which is, after all, how the film came into being in the first place.
The casting remains the film’s most robust asset. Arnett, long associated with the bombastic and the buffoonish, finds a heavy, physical weariness here that is genuinely arresting, playing Alex as a man surprised by his own sudden displacement. The trailer-capping line “I was unhappy in our marriage, not unhappy with our marriage” infuses every minute of the performance and his chemistry with Dern is built on the believable friction of two people who still fundamentally like one another but have reluctantly decided they can no longer share a life together. Dern avoids the usual tropes of the discarded spouse, instead offering a sharp-witted, and increasingly energised counterpoint to Arnett’s wry melancholy that highlights the different ways people process domestic collapse.
Matthew Libatique’s cinematography adopts a restless, documentary-style intimacy that often strays from the immersive to the intrusive. The camera – often held by Cooper himself unless he was in the scene in question – stays uncomfortably close, often pushing in for soul-baring close-ups that can feel more like acting-class exercises than narrative choices. By keeping the aperture wide and the focus tight on every pore and flicker of uncertainty, Is This Thing On? risks suffocating its subjects. There is a fine line between capturing raw pathos and simply staring, and Is This Thing On? frequently crosses into a territory that feels both self-indulgent and distracting, as if the director is more enamoured with the grain of the film stock than the flow of the story. The adoption of the aesthetics of 1970s grit but maintaining the comfortable, upper-middle-class safety net of a modern indie drama, results in a piece that is watchable and impeccably acted, yet curiously hollow.
The nagging awareness that the screenplay is loosely based on an anecdote from the life of British comic John Bishop further complicates the tone, the transition from a Scouse comedian’s midlife wobble to a glossy, Manhattan-set “champagne cinema” drama just feels fundamentally weird. While Bishop receives a story credit, the Americanisation of his experience creates a disconnect that is hard to ignore and Is This Thing On? might have been better to keep its origins for a second page IMDb Trivia note.
The “unfunny comedy” angle is where the film’s central artifice becomes most apparent. Alex’s foray into stand-up is treated with a solemnity usually reserved for rehab interventions, yet the material itself – intentionally mediocre rants about divorce – never quite justifies the reverence the film accords it. There’s a persistent sense of smugness in how the comedy world is portrayed too; depicted as a soulful, honourable priesthood of the damaged, populated by cameos from real-world regulars like Dave Attell and Chloe Radcliffe, a “performer’s film” vibe suggesting the creators are more interested in congratulating themselves on the nobility of their craft than in providing an engaging experience for the audience.
