I’d say the moment Is This Thing On? goes off the rails is when Peyton Manning shows up as a character who’s not Peyton Manning.
For reasons I’m still trying to figure out, the jovial football icon does the acting thing in Bradley Cooper’s latest directorial effort, playing a dude named Laird. While he does an OK job in the small role, I still spent most of his screen time uttering What is going on? over and over in my head. Don’t be surprised if you feel the same while watching this dramedy downer, another awkward marriage story co-starring Laura Dern.
Dern and Will Arnett are Tess and Alex Novak, a New York couple who have drifted apart over the course of their 20-year marriage. While Tess keeps the two boys and the dogs at their house, Alex is now living in some dumpy bachelor pad in the city. During a weed-cookie-induced haze (it’s a long story), Alex slips into a comedy club and tries his hand at stand-up, using his marital woes as comic fodder. (He mainly does it to avoid paying the $15 cover.)
The marvelous Mr. Novak turns out to be a natural at getting laughs, even though he looks like he’s on the verge of a full-on meltdown whenever he gets too personal. Cooper and cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s lensing often gets too in-your-face during the anxiety-inducing stand-up scenes, shot at famed workout room the Comedy Cellar. They often place the camera right in the mug of whoever’s onstage, catching every bead of sweat that falls even while the comic is killing. (I blame Joker for this.) Novak turns his dirty little secret into a therapeutic hobby, coming up with material and slowly becoming a regular among his fellow comics. Meanwhile, his former better half tries to move on — the onetime volleyball prodigy gets into coaching and even goes to dinner with Manning’s Laird. And that’s when shit goes south.
Is This Thing On? is yet another emotional journey through art and love for Cooper, who previously covered tortured musical geniuses and their long-suffering muses with A Star Is Born and Maestro. Using the story of sharp-dressed British comic John Bishop as his blueprint, Cooper (who wrote the script with Arnett and Mark Chappell) gets his Punch Line on and takes us inside the shit-talking world of New York stand-up in the film’s appealing first half. Arnett convincingly makes himself at home with his comic compatriots, including Amy Sedaris as a veteran booker and actual comedians Chloe Radcliffe, Reggie Conquest and onetime Nashvillian Jordan Jensen in bit roles.
At some point, Cooper remembered he was still doing a relationship film, refocusing on its main characters. Their clique is an oddly cast collective; along with Arnett’s Smartless co-host/pal Sean Hayes as one-half of a gay couple, we also have Cooper and soul singer Andra Day playing a mismatched pair. Cooper lays on the dopiness as Alex’s scatterbrained actor buddy (who’s named Balls, for some reason), while Day steps in as Alex’s petty archnemesis and the group’s resident center of attention.
In the film’s dysfunctional second half, Cooper and company bring home the oh-so-problematic message that the only way a marriage can survive is if a couple is miserable as fuck together — or something like that. It’s an odd hill to die on, especially when Arnett and Dern give off so much intimate chemistry (Cooper often places them in insanely close face-to-face shots, making us feel like we’re invading their personal space) that you never completely buy them as a couple on the outs. There isn’t even one couples-therapy scene here!
What should’ve been a film about two people rediscovering what brought them together by rediscovering themselves becomes a weird, bitter trip through middle-aged matrimonial hell. It also proves that loud-ass, ball-busting comedians are better hangs than married couples.
