Now three movies and seven years into his career as a filmmaker, the Philly transplant/West Village resident Bradley Cooper has featured a singer, a composer, and now a standup comedian in his work. His latest, Is This Thing On? — a film brought to him by his friend, star Will Arnett, based on the true story of the Manchester, England, sales director-turned-comedian John Bishop, who lived the cliché of using standup as therapy to cope with his impending divorce from his wife — is filled with performance. Arnett’s character, Alex Novak, sings to himself in the bathroom to ease the adrenaline following a moment of stress. In another scene, in the background, his children practice the baseline to Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” At one point, as brunch is being set at an Oyster Bay vacation home, a collection of adult friends casually breaks into a rendition of “Amazing Grace.” In this way, Cooper’s latest film is of a piece with his oeuvre to date, movies about the transformative power of performance, its value to artists of all stripes as an outlet, as redemption, as escape.
Unfortunately, that is nearly the only quality Is This Thing On? shares with Cooper’s first two films, A Star is Born and Maestro, movies that were meticulously constructed, from an obsessive film nerd who attacked his new role as auteur with an emotions-on-his-sleeve, blood-and-sweat intensity that was communicated in every studied and elegant camera move. Cooper is a director that shows his work, and part of the Bradley Cooper Experience is being impressed or turned off by watching a film its maker has clearly put so much effort into. These were prestige films with big stars and long productions, featuring performances that garnered awards hype and omnipresent, buzzy campaigns.
When Is This Thing On? was announced as a 2025 release, it lacked that same degree of anticipation and fanfare, even with its position, slated to premiere as the closing day selection at the New York Film Festival. When you watch the product, it’s clear why. This was not some long-gestating Fitzcarraldo that Cooper had to get out of his brain and onto screen. Rather, it was brought to Cooper by his old friend Arnett and the British writer Mark Chappell and shot in 33 days, in a few locations, importing John Bishop’s UK-based story to New York and setting almost all of those locations a few blocks from Cooper’s apartment, including his daughter’s school, a bar he used to hang out at in college, and the greatest comedy club in America. Chappell is a prolific sitcom writer and screenwriter of pleasant, middlebrow comedies, and with what feels like a light pass from Cooper, he has produced another one. Is This Thing On? can be best understood as a for-hire, post-Maestro palate cleanser for Cooper, a cool down following the relative disappointment of that yearslong, all-consuming passion project.
Alex, who works in finance, and his wife Tess, a retired Olympic volleyball player (Laura Dern), agree to end their 20-year marriage at the film’s outset, with the same passion and ceremony you might dedicate to deciding on Thai for dinner. He is the titular object that is “not on,” shut down and unhappy because he has sublimated himself for years in his family, which also consists of his two boys, 10-year-old Irish twins.
Alex and Tess live in the suburbs, but the film gives them unlikely bohemian friends from college, two couples, one gay (Sean Hayes and his actual husband Scott Icenogle), one straight (Andra Day and Bradley Cooper). Alex is forced to get a flat in the city, and one night, in the film’s most credulity-straining moment, signs up for an open mic to avoid paying door fees at the fucking Comedy Cellar of all places, and finds himself on stage, doing okay as he ambles his way through a stream of consciousness reflection of his shattered life for strangers. The film subsequently follows Alex catching the bug, as he finds his way back to himself on stage, and back to his wife off it. The film’s logline could very well be “Men will literally do standup to avoid going to therapy” (Or, “Take my wife, please”), and its arc is all Alan Ball-grade, made in the suburbs cliché ennui. It’s a sub-Husbands and Wives chatty, shaggy, unromantic comedy about the work of marriage that contains nothing but the kind of reheated, shallow revelation that a single session with a Zoom marriage counselor could have explained to the couple protagonists.
Also a problem is that the comedian at the center of the film is rarely funny. Will Arnett, on the other hand, is, which we know from one of this century’s great comedic performances, as Job in the first three seasons of Arrested Development. The performance he gave in that show was so great that he’s remained famous and able to get projects like these off the ground for 20 years, but as Alex, he’s against type. At first, this is by design, the shut down man offstage and the fledgling comic feeling his way toward his calling on it. But that dynamic never changes, even as he becomes a more competent performer with proven material who is supposed to be funny; his routines are hack observational relationship comedy that also serve as “revelatory” diary entries. Cooper wisely steals from FX’s Louie, casting real, great comedians around Arnett (Jordan Jensen, Reggie Conquest, Chloe Radcliffe, Dave Attell, and Amy Sedaris as den mother, all pulling up from the logo whenever they get an inch of daylight) and setting them around a table at the Olive Tree Cafe upstairs from The Cellar to share drinks and bust his balls. But the effect probably won’t do much more than just make you miss Louie, and the innocence you once were able to watch it with.
Which isn’t to say Is This Thing On? is without its laughs. Cooper literally falls into the movie, crushing a carton of oat milk under him on the floor of his absurd loft apartment. He’s an often high, struggling actor named Balls who in the film goes on a facial hair and wardrobe journey from an apostle to Marc Maron to Waylon Jennings. He turns in the film’s funniest and second best performance, and you find yourself often wanting to watch a movie about his character instead. Peyton Manning shows up for a memorable five-minute cameo, and the best joke in the film is his face when he learns that Laura Dern’s Tess, who he is out to dinner with, is newly separated from her husband and getting a divorce, responding as we all might if we were out to dinner with Laura Dern and suddenly discovered we might have a shot.
A thread running through Bradley Cooper’s films are powerful lead performances from women, and Dern continues this tradition. Coming off a long overdue Oscar win for her last film with Noah Baumbach, she was criminally underutilized in their recent reunion (Jay Kelly), but she isn’t here. Tess’ arc, getting back into volleyball through coaching and working out her feelings toward her husband after years of emotional neglect, are no less trite than the rest of the film, but Dern is operating at a register right now where if you put her on screen to read podcast ad copy, it would be compelling and compulsively watchable.
But this is a Bradley Cooper film, so even on a limited budget, with greatly restrained visual style, the film is shot in a tight aspect ratio and the handheld camera swoops and zooms intelligently across long takes of domestic dispute or Alex working on stage. (There’s no real way to explain it, but this writer would have bet that it was Cooper himself operating the camera when he wasn’t in the frame, which was confirmed after the screening in an in-person press conference.) There is some exhilaration and freedom in a filmmaker as thoughtful as Cooper throwing out much of the sub-Spielbergian blocking and letting the great camera spin. When it’s working, Is This Thing On? feels freer in a way that allows for more chaotic fun and naturalistic performances from his cast, so much so that you hope if Cooper takes anything from this experience, it’s that there can be discovery in occasionally letting your hand off the reins just slightly, as he so often does in his acting.
But it’s impossible to escape that this is all in service of a sappy, dopey film that builds to a non-resolution, a reunited husband and wife that have learned little beyond the common sense that they need lives of purpose outside of the home and that marriage can often be an unsentimental, unglamorous slog you must buy into everyday and work through together. And that it all culminates in a children’s performance of the aforementioned “Under Pressure,” punctuated with a full cast dance party that you’ve seen so many times before and scored to the exact same song, feels borderline parodic. Is This Thing On? is of a piece then with this prestige season in film, which features not unpleasant but also decidedly minor work from some great filmmakers. Ah well, perhaps the fire next time.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 6.
Comments are closed.