Is This Thing On?
2025
Oh, yes, this thing is definitely on.
The bounty of 2025 continues. We’ve had new films from Darren Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Bi Gan, Edward Berger, Bong Joon-Ho, Rian Johnson, Nia DaCosta, Richard Linklater, Richard Linklater again, Kogonada, Steven Soderbergh, Ron Howard, Ari Aster, Jon M. Chu, Chloé Zhao, Spike Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, Paul Feig, Bill Condon, Noah Baumbach, Rob Reiner, Danny Boyle, and many other famous directors I don’t enjoy and so will not name—with Jim Jarmusch, Paolo Sorrentino, and Hlynur Pálmason still on the way. And now we have the third film by one of my very favorite contemporary directors, Bradley Cooper!
After A Star Is Born and Maestro, Cooper experiments with a new bag of tricks with Is This Thing On? The film is (partly) about a man who starts doing stand-up as a way to talk through his complex feelings when he and his wife agree to a separation. Taking his cue from the art form at his film’s center (just as he did with pop and classical music in his prior works), Cooper develops a corresponding style. This time, the camera is restless and rambling, perfectly capturing the tone of stand-up comedy as well as the feeling of stumbling through your life in shock and confusion. The music also has an improvised feel, while blending in some pieces that reminded me of Philip Glass’s postmodern opera, Einstein on the Beach. The performances are candid, lived-in, and human-sized, even/especially when the actor’s faces often loom large in direct close-ups that leave them nowhere to hide.
Will Arnett is the lead, and he proves that he can actually act. Laura Dern is his wife, whose acting was never in doubt. They are surrounded by real comedians as well as a number of other marriages. Bradley Cooper plays one of these spouse-friends with the unlikely name of Balls and a jocular case of narcotic burnout. His character may not be quite calibrated to the realism of the rest of the piece, but the energy and naturalism of the performances are what allow the film to do its job so well.
It is a movie about marriage, and it is suitably complicated and messy and angry and heartwarming. Two lines of dialogue struck me directly in the heart: “A real relationship is also about finding someone you can be unhappy with” and “I was unhappy in our marriage; I wasn’t unhappy with our marriage.” By the time credits rolled, I was both beaming and fighting back tears. Is This Thing On? may wear a mask of cynicism, but it is a nutritious batch of comfort food. It’s another big win for 2025!
Brilliant take on how Cooper's directing evolves through musical forms! The distinction between being unhappy "in" versus "with" a marriage is such a precise observation, and it's fascinating how stand-up comedy lets the film embrace that messiness without needing to resolve it. I've noticed smilar patterns in relationships where people mistake situational frustration for fundamental incompatibility. The Philip Glass comparison also feels spot-on for capturing that repetitive, churning energy of someone stuck in their own head during a seperation.