The Debut: Julianne Moore gives a showstopping performance as a woman transformed by community theatre

• Reviewed from the 2026 San Sebastián Film Festival. 

Power, so the old slogan goes, is nothing without control. It’s a lesson learned the thrillingly hard way by Mona Friedman (Julianne Moore), late-blooming protagonist of Jesse Eisenberg’s third outing as writer-director: The Debut is a raucously entertaining crowdpleaser which itself derives comic energy from the way it balances conventional tendencies and darker, more adventurous energies while successfully navigating a tricky path between plausibility and caricature.

Mona is a sixtysomething doormat-dormouse whose long-dormant creative juices are unleashed after she lands a minor role in her suburban town’s latest “community-theatre” production, a banal romantic musical called Nosy Neighbors. The (thankfully fictional) show’s accurately cheesy numbers are all by Eisenberg, who by the age of seven was starring in a production of Oliver! and who 35 years later occasionally pops up here, gamely hoofing and warbling away.

The semi-unwitting catalyst for Mona’s dramatic metamorphosis is Jerry (Paul Giamatti), a cantankerous former stage-actor who moved into directing when roles started drying up. And while Eisenberg’s lengthy career in front of the camera is still going strong, it’s telling that at this juncture he should elect to craft such a passionate paean to the transformative powers of a talented director.

Determined to draw (or drag) out what he alone perceives as Mona’s thespian potential – even though hers is, in his words, “a thankless and tertiary character” – the long-jaded Jerry is a Henry Higgins who finds he has created something of a Frankenstein’s monster. The latter’s spectacular emergence is sparked by a hysterical set-piece which arrives around the half-hour mark as Mona is repeatedly and rowdily encouraged to find some measure of emotional truth in a seemingly innocuous line.

Destined to be pored over by acting-students for years to come, this simply mounted two-hander effectively ended the 2027 Best Actress “race” when The Debut premiered at Telluride in September. Moore’s first Oscar-nominated performance, as porn-star Maggie – ‘Amber Waves’ – in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) saw this (already) outstanding actor playing a genuinely terrible one.

Here she gets to trace the jaggedly upward arc of a former choir-singer resuming public performance after a full half-century, and after much sturm un drang achieving a level if not of greatness, then certainly of surprisingly impressive competence. Eisenberg also slyly harks back to another of Moore’s iconic and Oscar-nominated roles, Cathy Whitaker in Todd Haynes’ Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven (2002).

It isn’t too fanciful to suggest that there is a certain Sirkian dimension in Eisenberg’s tale of a suburban mother-of-university-age children, stranded in a problematically unrewarding marriage and finding unlikely redemption via belated self-realisation.

The emotional spousal-confrontation scenes which traditionally go with this terrain are, however, commendably absent. Exploring her new-found reserves of agency, Mona simply relocates from her angular, beige residence in an affluent neighbourhood to an inner-city flophouse hotel — Lynch/Ferrara territory amusingly rendered in sulphurous, expressionistic shadows by cinematographer Drew Daniels.

While itself not technically a musical, The Debut knowingly operates in the semi-fantastical environment which stage-musicals often occupy. And while the comic elements – some of them quite broad – are what pull the audience into the film, the sections which linger longer in the memory are Mona’s nighttown escapades in the relatively ‘real’ world.

This is an explicitly hazardous environment from which she has been previously insulated by unquestioned class-privileges. And it’s no coincidence that Mona’s Nosy Neighbors alter-ego, Miss Danielle, should be such a tough grimy-handed broad. The tenement caretaker/rent-collector is also unmarried and somewhat lesbian-coded — red-head Moore has effectively morphed into a bargain-basement Liza Minnelli by curtain-up.

During the film’s later stages, as the premiere looms and Mona’s haphazard, giddily exhilarating journey through method-madness shades towards genuine psychosis, we glimpse contours of some Dionysian phantasmagoria that combines Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977) with Aronofsky’s Requiem For a Dream (2000) while somehow still managing to be very funny indeed.

At The Debut’s eleventh hour, however, Eisenberg – reteaming with Robert Nassau, editor of his bracingly economical A Real Pain (2024) – steps back from the abyss. His sunnily upbeat coda is a retreat into the conventional, one which of course makes understandable commercial sense. Chop off that short epilogue, however, and what remains would be much more challengingly, tantalisingly ambiguous while also satisfying the golden rule of showbiz: always leave ‘em wanting more.

► The Debut is screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival on 18 October and will be released in UK cinemas on 15 January 2027.