Last Christmas, the audience at an open-mic night in New York welcomed to the stage a new standup. Alex Novak, he said his name was. Mildly funny, bit depressed. Mostly told jokes about getting divorced. Weirdest thing though: he looked exactly like that guy from Arrested Development.
“I was so naively unaware of what to expect,” says Will Arnett, almost a year later. “I’ve been comedy-adjacent for a lot of my life, but not a comedian. I had no idea what I was in for.”
That was a crash course in confessional standup. Five nights a week, for six weeks, Arnett would write and perform material across the city, going up cold, ignoring any hecklers who might insist he was actually the star of one of the US’s best-loved sitcoms, as well as BoJack Horseman, Blades of Glory, The Lego Movie etc.
All this to prepare for his first dramatic movie lead as a man who walks into a bar, finds he can dodge the entrance fee if he agrees to five minutes on stage in the basement comedy club – and finds himself in the process.
“Every time a comic goes on stage, they are jumping off a cliff,” says Arnett. “It’s unnerving and very scary.” Sometimes it paid off. One night he went to a club, “and killed it. They loved it. Really vibed with me. And then I went around the corner to a different club, did the same jokes, and completely bombed.”
Some actors are smaller than you expect. Arnett is more substantial: tall and brawny. Still, he withers at the memory. “There’s nowhere to hide. You feel your soul leaving your body. I’d gone up with such confidence, but there was just this profound silence. The only laughter I could hear was at the back of the room, and it was Bradley.”
Bradley is Bradley Cooper. This is his third film as writer-director; he also co-stars as Alex’s best friend, a vain actor called Balls. Also rubbernecking from the crowd that night was Andra Day, who plays Balls’ waspish wife Christine.
“It was so cool to watch Will’s body absorb how the audience was not responding,” she says with glee. “Every little gesture. How uncomfortable his head was.” Day is a singer-songwriter; years of gigs mean she knows how it feels when patter dies. “But I have the luxury of saying: ‘All right! Let’s play the next track! Move on!’”
Arnett, however, struggled to turn a doomed ship around. “You try to recalibrate by amping up the delivery,” he says, but then people seem yet more repelled. “Comedy is much more of a conversation than I realised. You have to listen to them respond before you build toward the punchline. To let them be invested. You want them to lean in.”
Cooper’s films are, it’s fair to say, interested in this transaction. In how performing both feeds and leeches; how being adored or torn apart by strangers affects your personal life. A Star Is Born, Maestro and Is This Thing On? all feature scenes in which someone falls in love (or back in love) with the protagonist as they perform live. “What seems to recur,” says Cooper – or, in fact, emails, of which more later – “is the idea that artistic expression requires a vulnerability that reveals something deeply human. In each of the films, the moment of falling in love happens when that truth becomes visible.”
In this case, that happens when Alex’s ex, Tess (Laura Dern), goes on a date with another man and they wind up at a club where Alex happens to be performing. Unseen at the back, unaware the man she was married to for decades had ever even considered comedy, she watches agog, by turns appalled, amused – and turned on. “Tess glimpses the person she once loved coming back into focus,” says Cooper.
In a London hotel room down the hall from Arnett, Dern leans forward keenly. “This theme of committing to being unhappy with someone touches me so much,” she says. “It’s the same experience many of us have had in a relationship: how did we get here? How have we lost ourselves and each other? The film taught me a lot as a woman about the goal of a relationship – that it has to be that whole journey all the time. Because,” she continues, “we are ever-evolving organisms!” She smiles: engaged, evangelical even, all empathy and connection.
Alex and Tess reconcile as each finds the freedom to explore their own passions (him: comedy, her: basketball). Growth is essential, the film suggests. So is realism. Being unhappy with someone isn’t great, but being unhappy alongside them might be the best we can hope for.
Dern thinks her generation (she’s 58) is often too entrenched to compromise, let alone reinvent. Her children – Ellery, 25, and Jaya, 21– are wiser. “They have been raised with so much noise around performative social media living,” she says. “‘Let’s show everybody how this moment feels! Let’s see how many followers care about it!’ So they’re now like: can we just put it away and actually just be connected and honest and a mess?”
She shudders. “Showing people what you’re eating or wearing feels like middle-school all the time. Being judged for the length of my skirt or what I said to the boy. Oh my God, it’s exhausting!”
In the room next door, Day (40) says she has no time for artifice. “People’s arrogance is often just really deep-seated insecurity,” she says. “We’re only getting half-versions of everyone as they’re trying to hide.” Once you drop the act, she says, “you never wanna go back in, to disappear into the performative part of life ever again.”
The original idea for the film was Arnett’s. It came after a chance meeting with the Liverpudlian comedian John Bishop, who did indeed first try standup to avoid paying a cover charge, took to it, started using it as quasi-counselling, then reconnected with the mother of his children after she accidentally saw him perform. The main difference between fact and fiction is the quality of the jokes. Bishop became successful; Alex probably won’t. “Yeah,” says Arnett, “if Alex wants to keep doing this, he’s got to get funny.”
When we spoke, Stephen Colbert’s late-night satirical talkshow had just been axed and Jimmy Kimmel’s future looked shaky. US TV comedy seemed especially imperilled. Yet, Arnett – a staple of the scene for 25 years – was circumspect. “It is and it isn’t under threat. It’s always been like that. The court jester looked over his shoulder to make sure he pleased the king. So I don’t know if I am particularly troubled. There are plenty of people out there pushing the boundaries and finding a way to do it. It probably forces you to be a little more clever.”
What drew him to the story was not the comedy, he says, but the drama – a chance to flex other muscles and draw on some unfunny personal history. “It demanded I look at my own experiences. And you don’t have to know much about me to know there are strains and commonalities.” Arnett is referring to his own split from Amy Poehler, with whom he has two sons, in 2012. At the time, it was major gossip in the US; the personal lives of both parties remain, like that of Cooper, tabloid catnip.
Unlike A Star is Born and Maestro, Is This Thing On? is not about people who are enormously famous. And yet, like Noah Baumbach’s (considerably inferior) movie-star-in-crisis film Jay Kelly – which also features Dern – its concerns betray the fact it was made by people who are enormously famous.
So there is quite a lot about how uncomfortable it feels to see massive photos of yourself you don’t feel are representative of your whole being. Alex enlarges to poster size a photo he loves of Tess spectacularly sinking a hoop decades earlier. She’s not flattered. “It’s because that’s not her,” says Dern. “It’s an idea of her. And that is the story of many of our lives: a moment captured in time that someone is still judging us on. I’ve had it from the other side, too, with projection.”
Being troubled by such stuff is, concedes Arnett, a first-world problem. “But it is odd to see yourself out there in the world in that way. It’s really weird.”
Cooper doesn’t respond on this one. Maybe he doesn’t need to. Given how energetically he hit the press trail for his previous films, plus the themes of this one, it feels significant that he’s opting to back-seat it this time round. Is This Thing On? is a loose and relaxed movie that is also surprisingly sharp on how much of yourself you should supply to strangers in the service of art. Cooper’s email answers are highly considered and curated, script tightly controlled – even now.
At one point, Alex’s preteen sons happen upon a rough draft of his father’s latest routine. They’re distressed. “None of that stuff is real,” he says, comforting them. “It’s all made up. None of it’s real life, really.” But that’s not true: Alex is, by and large, impeccably honest. So when does sharing something become betrayal?
“I don’t think I could define that boundary for anyone else,” says Cooper. “‘Betrayal’ is a heavy term, and these moments tend to be highly circumstantial. I recall reading not long ago about a comedian whose material left the subject of the joke feeling genuinely betrayed. And if someone feels betrayed by what was shared, then in some sense there is a betrayal. Their emotional reality is valid.
“For myself, I’m very deliberate about sharing anything from my private life in a public setting, because other people are inevitably part of those stories, and they haven’t necessarily chosen to be included. It’s something I try to approach with care. That may sound a bit old-fashioned in a culture where everything is shared so freely, but it’s the way I orient myself.”
Cooper has an eight-year-old daughter, Lea, who played Leonard Bernstein’s daughter in some of Maestro. Is This Thing On? is bookended by scenes set at school performances. “Bradley said he went to one when we were in preproduction,” says Dern, “and all the kids were having this amazing moment and all the parents were on their phones. And he was like: ‘There’s a lion! Dancing! In front of us!’”
She rolls her eyes. “We’ve allowed the noise to take over so completely. But if you wake up to self, you wake to your children. To a moment that you may define in your busy adult brain as less important than that text from your boss.”
“As a parent,” writes Cooper, “watching a school performance becomes a deeply subjective experience. The moment your own child is on stage, a whole world of personal history and emotion comes with you. The audience is essentially a collection of people engaged in private internal narratives – reflecting, remembering, projecting. That shared interiority gives school performances a kind of quiet, unexpected magic.”
Those scenes are among the film’s finest. They capture something of the weird potency of guileless prancing. “There’s an innocence to children performing,” says Cooper, “a transparency of feeling, an almost complete indifference to success or failure; they’re simply expressing themselves. Whatever is happening within them is visible, unfiltered – which is ironic, because that’s exactly what adult performers spend their lives trying to recreate: a genuine moment in an imagined circumstance.”
It must be strange to be in a profession in which you sweat all day for excellence, then go and watch your kid just casually pull it off without blinking. Is This Thing On? relies on the idea that that toil is worth it and honest adult performance is intrinsically cathartic.
More committed, even, than Cooper himself. “I’ve certainly had experiences where it felt quite the opposite – more stressful than liberating,” he writes. “Still, in hindsight, even those moments tend to become cathartic. When you place yourself in a situation that’s uncomfortable and demands you push past your limits, there’s inevitably some emotional release or insight that emerges.”
“It’s never not cathartic,” says Dern, ever the pro. “Even if it’s a difficult job or people aren’t feeling fulfilled or they’re missing the point. I have played some rough folks that I don’t necessarily want to admit are a part of me, but I have to find the part of me in them to connect. And that’s exciting.”
The rough is hard to spot today. Dern is the definition of polish. She may not be a comedian, but it’s impossible to imagine that, had she been the one taking to the stage, anonymously, in a random comedy club, she wouldn’t have nailed it.
Dern sells this film, as she does her others, with such chewy commitment you could use her quotes on the poster. Is this Thing On? is a “roadmap to not missing it”, she says. Her son seems cut from the same cloth: “‘This is the best movie to see as I’m starting my journey,’” he told her after watching it. “‘It makes me wanna love by being my most vulnerable.’”
She beams with satisfaction. “My generation had fairytales: Prince Charming shows up, you must say yes. So it’s pretty incredible to have an alternative.”
And, she adds, gesturing at the TV in the corner, an alternative to all that. “I don’t know how I’ve become yet again addicted to checking in on the world right before I go to sleep. A horrible idea. But we have to tune out from the resentments and the fear, and say that because of them, this is the moment we have to be our most connected.”
Don’t dismiss Is This Thing On?, she says. This isn’t just industry frippery or a comedy of remarriage. There’s a radical moral at its core. “It could be global, even political, to say: ‘I want to be unhappy with you. I’m fighting for this thing we call life, despite all the noisy, chaotic crap.’ We are all on the planet at the same time. And if we don’t lead with love, we are lost.”