Is This Thing On?, review: doing stand-up comedy to rediscover yourself

Comedian John Bishop once recounted finding stand-up comedy a kind of therapeutic aid against post-divorce depression: getting on stage and telling jokes helped him to lighten the mood of a painful separation. It is from this anecdote that Is This Thing On? draws inspiration, whose unfortunate Italian title conveys little of the potential expressed by Bradley Cooper's third, surprising directorial effort. It's better, therefore, to refer to the original English, Is This Thing On?: an easy joke for a bad comedian who ironizes about his audience's unenthusiastic response, but also a phrase that someone new to the stage easily lets slip. Both interpretations fit Alex (Will Arnett) well, who gets on stage for the first time after eating a cannabis cookie with the wife he is separating from. Annoyed by the fifteen-dollar entrance fee to a cabaret club where he wants to have a drink, tipsy and high, Alex signs up for open mic night just to get in without paying.

Stand-up comedy is not the true heart of Is This Thing On?

An impulsive decision that opens up an unknown world to him, made of rules, routines, and logics that he ignores, because unlike his colleagues, he is neither a fan nor does he intend to make comedy his profession. What he feels in front of the open mic is a sense of profound clarity, the ability to see his relationship and his life from an external perspective and, in focusing on himself, manage to elicit some laughs from the audience. Is This Thing On? is a film about cabaret, but only up to a certain point, because it maintains the same point of view as its protagonist, for whom it remains a hobby and an outlet through which to understand himself, to feel more fulfilled.

It's a development that all the characters in the film share, starting with his wife Tess (Laura Dern), a former professional volleyball player who hasn't been able to find anything equally important and personal in her life once she stopped competitive activity. The marriage with Alex goes into crisis precisely because Tess dedicates herself to her family and her two children without realizing that it's not enough for her to feel fulfilled as a person. It is the crumbling marital relationship, revolutionized by the impending separation, that constitutes the true heart of the film: it is captured in that strange moment when, after the initial break, the couple sometimes finds a certain understanding again precisely thanks to the greater distance from which the two components truly begin to look at each other again. The second part of the film focuses on this renewed frankness in communication, even about things that hurt, and it practically takes off vertically in terms of quality: the advice for those who approach this beautiful film is to let themselves be guided through an initial period where neither the destination nor the meaning is clear, because Cooper has a complete daily story with a truly emotional and cathartic ending in store for the patient viewer.

At its core, the film is a multi-voiced narrative of how daily routine and coupledom can lead to unhappiness, because the necessity of some form of personal fulfillment, however small and collateral to one's work or family, is underestimated. Bradley Cooper's dramedy doesn't lack a touch of bitterness, as he chooses a comedic actor like Will Arnett (here in great form playing a man out of shape in many senses) for a dramatic role of a man who discovers he loves making people laugh. The most fascinating aspect is that, precisely, there is no immense ambition or revolution in Alex's life, for whom stand-up remains, amidst some highs and many lows, something cathartic and therapeutic.

Cooper knows how to move, this time without mawkishness

Cooper follows him, the arguments with Tess, and the open mic nights very closely, with a handheld camera and continuous, very dynamic close-ups that leave the protagonist no escape and create almost a kind of intimacy with the viewer, in the front row to catch the most volatile changes in the emotional rollercoaster that telling his story on stage provokes. The film also manages to find a contagious glimmer of hope in its realism: the goal is not perfect happiness, just as Alex will probably never be a truly talented stand-up comedian, Tess will never return to the level of fitness she had when she played in the Olympics, and their two children can at best aspire to do a recognizable but still off-key cover of Queen's "Under Pressure." The point of Cooper's film is almost contrary to the usual performativity, to the resulting competition as metrics of judgment by which art is often evaluated: art that becomes worthy of being treated and told only if the practitioner is exceptionally good. No, in Is This Thing On? the point is how artistic or sporting performance works on our brain, how it provides moments of clarity about who one is and in what direction one is going.

Cooper's direction does a lot in this sense to make the film work, making us rediscover his cinema full of sentiment and tenderness, but this time free of certain mawkishness of the past. As an actor, he gives himself perhaps the most thankless role: that of a penniless actor who refuses to face reality, who lives off his very assertive, caustic wife, with whom he creates a couple seemingly made of conflicts and passive-aggressiveness. Yet it is precisely Balls (it's unclear if it's a nickname, a surname, a tragic name) with all his sloppiness and mediocrity who delivers the most beautiful scene of the film, that small moment of truth that one takes away from the theater.