“Is This Thing On?” is at its most powerful in the quiet moments, those small, painful, familiar beats that define a relationship long past its breaking point. Director Bradley Cooper’s third feature trades grand drama for lived-in naturalism, and in doing so creates one of the more convincing portraits of a marriage in dissolution in recent memory. This film is sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes painful to watch, but it’s also quite realistic and very human.
The story follows Alex (Will Arnett), a man who is facing middle age and an impending divorce with a sudden, arguably ill-advised turn toward confessional stand-up comedy in New York’s West Village. It’s a career pivot that sounds outlandish on paper but is rooted in the true experiences that inspired the film, and Arnett carries it with surprising vulnerability. Meanwhile, his wife Tess (Laura Dern) must confront the sacrifices she made for their family and the complicated process of building a new identity post marriage. Their journeys, though separate, continually echo one another, creating a portrait of divorce that is as much about soul searching as it is about loss.
At the heart of the film are two deeply felt performances from Arnett and Dern. They absolutely nail the body language of a couple standing on the edge of a split. There’s the shorthand of shared history, the ease that coexists with tension, and the cramped way old tenderness brushes against new resentments. Cooper gives them room to breathe, and they fill that space with an almost uncomfortable authenticity. The depiction of this long term familiarity and how two people can be both intimately connected while simultaneously quietly drifting apart is painfully, beautifully accurate.
While Cooper hits the mark with emotional precision, the movie struggles with some very familiar clichés. The “comedian breaks down on stage” moment feels lifted from a dozen other films (it borders too closely on cringe worthy territory here), and the ending’s use of “Under Pressure” is a painfully on-the-nose flourish in a film that otherwise prides itself on subtlety. These choices don’t ruin the movie, but they do momentarily break the spell of authenticity Cooper works so hard to create.
Clichés aside, “Is This Thing On?” is a strikingly honest breakup story that understands the bittersweet truth that sometimes the hardest part of ending a marriage isn’t the anger or the heartbreak, but the familiarity you have to learn to live without.
By: Louisa Moore
Screen Zealots 