This thing is barely on

I am, admittedly, not on the same wavelength that many cinephiles are when it comes to Bradley Cooper as a director, or as a writer/director. I have enjoyed Cooper in a great many projects, and as a filmmaker, he seems to be genuinely passionate, driven, creative, and endlessly fascinated with the human condition. But – again – as a director, his projects seem to operate at a curious distance from the humans that he is endeavoring to painstakingly studying and/or inventing, as if (and I know you may have to suspend disbelief here) the son of a Merrill Lynch stockbroker who appears to have never held a job outside of acting and has been spectacularly famous, rich, and successful for the last 15 years or so may not exactly have a firm grasp on what real human beings might be like.

I am one of the few people who isn't completely in love with his directorial debut, the 2018 version of A Star is Born, but I also think every version of A Star is Born fucking stinks, and that Gina Prince-Bythewood's Beyond the Lights made the only tolerable version of the A Star is Born story four years before Jackson Maine pissed himself at the Grammys. ("The Shallows" is undeniably a bop, of course, but presumably Cooper had very little to do with how good the Lady Gaga song was from that movie.) Cooper's next directing effort was his longtime passion project, 2023's Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. I admire the film's scope and dedication and attention to detail, and it is of course wonderfully directed (and Carey Mulligan is phenomenal in it), but it's often laughable and overall there isn't really a take there, other than Cooper's seeming fascination with both Jewishness and homosexuality, but being neither of those things, it takes on a bizarre veneer of gawking at things, marveling at them without any possibly capacity for understanding them. (It did, of course, give us "who left Snoopy in the vestibule" and shortly thereafter the funniest cameo from a balloon in film history.)

Cooper is back with his third film, Is This Thing On?, a portrait of modern(?) divorce wrapped in a quasi-true story about standup comedy that is utterly baffling throughout, but serves as sort of an anti-Marriage Story in nearly every way. (Requisite link back to my post about Noah Baumbach films here.) Co-written by Cooper and star Will Arnett, the movie has a third writing credit for Mark Chappell and an additional Story By credit to the man upon whom the premise is thinly based on, English comedian John Bishop. The premise, such that it is, is that Bishop's wife, from whom he was separated at the time, by chance attended an open mic standup show that she wasn't aware he would be at, and an off-color joke about her – without knowing she was in the audience – rekindled their relationship.

Is This Thing On? opens with Arnett's character and his wife, played by Laura Dern, already having decided to split up, and being amicable with each other, with their kids, and with their friends. (Cooper himself is perhaps the best part of the movie, playing a delusional burnout dubiously named "Balls" who serves as Arnett's best friend and occasional sounding board.) Arnett – who is somehow employed in a well-paying job, but whose job is never seen or discussed in the film – casts about for something to do now that his marriage has fizzled, and one night, not wanting to pay a cover charge to get into a bar, signs up for an open mic comedy night. He tells stories about his marriage to the most polite open mic crowd that has ever existed outside of a church, and is energized by the experience of performing in front of an audience – or whatever it was that he did. After his second time at an open mic, he is welcomed into the fraternity of standup comics that sits above the showroom and is introduced to the concept of standup comedy and how it actually works.

The film is extremely smart to cast actual standup comics as the non-Arnett standup comics, and enlists some great ones like Jordan Jensen and Chloe Radcliffe. Portraying standup comedians as spotlight addicts who only hang out with other comics and have to constantly write and perform in order to be able to do anything at all (while also trying to hold actual jobs) is the second-most believable part of the film. (Arnett immediately becoming a smoker as soon as he starts doing standup is the most realistic aspect of the movie by far.) But every time the movie stumbles into something resembling the truth, it does ten things that are entirely baffling. Arnett begins feeling alive from his new hobby, and Dern accidentally watching his set and being simultaneously turned on and offended leads to the exes dating again in secret. There are a lot of directions this movie could have gone, and perhaps if you saw some of the trailers, you expected this to tell a different story than "two nice people are mostly pleasant to each other for a couple of hours." I certainly expected something else.

It's not a bad movie, but it isn't a good movie, either. One of my biggest question marks is the pull quote in one of the trailers claiming "Laura Dern is a revelation." To whom? Are you just now seeing her in a movie? Had that not happened before? She was fifty times better than Jay Kelly, which came out like two weeks before this movie. DID YOU NOT SEE LITTLE WOMEN?! Dern's arc in the movie is that she's a former Olympic volleyball player who has apparently (we learn very deep into the film) never been able to shake the ghost of her legendary volleyball career, and that ... somehow gestated the rot that led to the disillusion of the marriage?

Cooper is so fascinated with people, and types of people, and specific people. He was supposed to play Anthony Bourdain in a movie and spent a year learning how to be a top-level chef, but that movie fell through, so he strongarmed the movie Burnt into production, so that he could actually put his cooking skills on film for the whole world to see. But three movies in, it's becoming more clear that he doesn't know what people are, and that's what makes them so fascinating to him. The end result of his films is akin to an alien peeling our skin back to find out how we keep it on. He's skilled as a director, he's skilled as an actor, and I hope his next movie is about something he understands a little bit more. Maybe stockbroking.