Is This Thing On? review: Will Arnett delivers just the right amount of self-deprecation in a rom-com based on the life of comedian John Bishop

The ‘mid-budget movie for adults’, so often mourned as a casualty of Hollywood economics, still has its champions, prominent among them Bradley Cooper, whose third film as director concerns the problems of exactly the kind of middle-aged, (upper) middle-class people who used to prop up the cinematic middlebrow, but these days are more likely to stay home and stream something. Indeed, that complacency is more or less the problem: when we meet Alex and Tess Novak (Will Arnett and Laura Dern), they’ve settled into a no longer comfortable rut, and are ready to call time on the marriage. 

Even after they agree to separate, they share an ease and familiarity that’s easier to perform in front of others than in private. With their friends, including college pal Christine (Andra Day) and her husband, a feckless actor known as ‘Balls’ (Cooper, giving himself all the best lines as a microdosing buffoon), they maintain an annual vacation ritual and inside jokes, and they’re committed co-parents to two elementary school-aged sons (who, it’s established early on, are rehearsing for a school band performance of ‘Under Pressure’ – wonder if that will come up in the third act!). 

Now staying on his own in a drab New York City bachelor pad, Alex wanders down MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, a lane of alternating late-night falafel shops and comedy clubs, and pops into one of the latter. To avoid the cover charge, he puts his name down for the open mic, where, after an anguished, searching silence, he cracks a few self-deprecating jokes about his sad sack life, and gets some pity chuckles and one or two real guffaws – enough laughs, anyway, to re-energise him just as he had resigned himself to a slow fade into the background. 

This is more or less the origin story of John Bishop, the English comic whose life inspired the film; a trace of Bishop’s Scouse origins remains in the film – Alex is a Liverpool fan – though Bishop’s backstory in sport is reassigned to Tess, once an Olympic volleyball player and now, newly single, motivated to reset after an enervating retirement. When she unexpectedly attends Alex’s best stand-up set in the film – he’s uncensored, his fullest self, and offers a few elegant reflections on their marital problems – it sparks something in both of them. The two begin sleeping together on the sly, as his parents (Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds) hover and Christine and Balls undergo their own parallel marital strain, inviting lots of conversations about giving grace, pooling unhappiness and other couples-counselling clichés. 

There’s a lineage here: a Manhattan midlife reinvention as in An Unmarried Woman (1978), the longtime friend group unsettled by divorce as in The Four Seasons (1981), the confluence of niche professions and romantic neuroses seen in many James L. Brooks films. The comparisons, alas, do not flatter Cooper, who has set his aim higher than the frequent therapyspeak of the dialogue can handle. He works again with Matthew Libatique, his cinematographer on A Star Is Born (2018). As he did in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2011), Libatique pushes in for soul-baring close-ups in shaky handheld, in performance scenes that play like acting-class monologue exercise – the camera searches for raw pathos in every pore of Arnett’s face as he runs through jokes seemingly improvised on the fly, sifting through the raw material of his life in muttered set-ups until he stumbles on a riff and barks out a punchline. 

The film proceeds as if its audience doesn’t know that a comedian’s stage persona is a construct. Aside from beginning to keep a journal for his observations, there is no sense that Alex is developing his craft, and he never seems in control on stage, any more than a funny, half self-aware, very depressed guy on the next barstool does. What Alex finds in the warmly lit bull sessions and shop talk with his fellow comics is less mentorship and camaraderie than the thrill of attention – he’s like their mascot, and comedy-club audiences, too, must surely be responding to his personal journey with more indulgence than admiration, laughing in a parasocial, aw-bless-his-heart sort of way. If the film works at all, it’s because Arnett is indeed genuinely relatable, with his husky morning-after voice and a feral bitterness behind his eyes redolent of the accumulated fatigue of male midlife – he’s an adult, in a movie made for them. 

► Is This Thing On? is in UK cinemas from 30 January.