Is This Thing On?

Bradley Cooper follows up his big directorial swings, A Star is Born and Maestro, with this odd little picture based extremely loosely on the career origin story of British comedian John Bishop. Will Arnett stars as an unhappily married man who, like Bishop, randomly puts his name on a list for an open mic night and discovers that doing stand-up is a great way to process his recent separation from his wife. Laura Dern plays the wife, a former Olympic volleyball player who has been unhappy since retiring from the sport to start a family with her husband.

Somewhere buried in this self-help memoir masquerading as a comedy is a good story about what it's like to split up with someone you still care deeply about, but that's about 24 minutes of this 2-hour and 24-minute dramady. For most of the film, we're inside the mind of Arnett's character as he struggles with his emotions and becomes an instant minor success as a stand-up. This is one of those movies that accurately portrays amateur stand-up as terribly unfunny, but makes the mistake of assuming we'd want to watch it, provided it's connected to the narrative journey of a character we care about. But, as Nora Ephron's 1992 directorial debut, This Is My Life, proved, even if the protagonist is played by an actor we love, bad stand-up is far more painful to watch in a fictionalized context than it is live in a club.

While there are a few nice scenes between Arnett and Dern, the supporting characters act like ballast weighing down a balloon with not enough helium to lift it off the ground. Andra Day, whom we haven't really seen in a movie since her impressive leading turn in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, and Cooper himself play one-note roles as the couple's married friends (at least Day and Copper get to play characters, unlike the other couple-friends, Sean Hayes and Scott Icenogle). This is one of those movies where I lost patience with the central characters early because of their choices. I felt like saying, 'No wonder you're not happy; you've got shitty friends. Get some new ones, it's not as hard in middle age as everyone says.' Of course, that would rob us of the small handful of scenes in which these characters speak truthfully to each other, which are decent scenes.

Bad-to-mediocre stand-up comedy has become far too important to our culture. Boy, do I miss the days when bands and singer/songwriters were the artists and art forms we turned to help us process our thoughts and feelings.