(courtesy IMP Awards)
One thing that strikes you pretty quickly as you exit childhood and enter the uncertain wilds of adulthood is that many of the big moments, which Hollywood has conditioned us to believe happen in big, soap operatic scenes, actually play out in far smaller, quieter ways.
It’s doesn’t quite fit the idea that big changes in life should be epic and blockbuster in scope, size and intensity and many people still keep looking for the huge twists and turns of life to be mirrored in events of a suitably large size.
Not so actor-writer-director Bradley Cooper who, along with Will Arnett and Mark Chappell, the writing team behind Is This Thing On? who intimately appreciate that the smallest of moments in life can have the biggest impact and usually happen with nothing than the ticking of a clock and an awkward fumbling towards a new reality.
It’s not glamorous, it’s not newsworthy, it’s just life doing its under-the-radar thing; having said that though, as Is This Thing On? also makes pointedly if understatedly clear, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a seismic impact on someone’s life when the gears shift and the same-old-same-old becomes all-new and bewilderingly different.
Long-term married couple Alex and Tess Novak (Will Arnett and Laura Dern respectively) have mutually agreed to end their twenty-year marriage, bringing to a 6-year relationship which both agree, if with some reluctance, has run its course.
Each of them have accepted there’s no other way of the morass that their marriage has become that they can see – the italicised phrase is crucial because when you’re down in the weeds, seeing anything can be all but impossible – and so Will moves out, his departure causing consternation to sons Felix (Blake Kane) and Jude (Calvin Knegten) who, naturally enough for 10-year-olds, have questions.
It’s in the midst of this civil but still emotionally messy, reasonably amicable transition from married to life to new individualistic lives that Alex, trying to avoid a cover change he can’t afford at a bar called the Comedy Cellar, signs up for a stand-up comedy open mic night.
He figures they won’t really call on him, at least not until he’s had a drink and headed back to his grim bachelor apartment with all the charm of a Soviet one-bedroom dwelling, but he figures wrong and soon he’s up on stage delivering what is less a stand-up routine than a rambling dissection, with some mildly funny observations thrown in, about the end of his marriage.
It’s not world-beating but it’s enough to get him invited back by fellow comics like Nina (Chloe Radcliffe), Jill (Jordan Jensen) and Dan (Reggie Conquest) and by Comedy Cellar emcee Kemp (Amy Sedaris) who gives off a mildly acerbic mother hen vibe, and for Alex to realise this is something he could come to really like.
Based loosely on the real life experiences of British comic John Bishop, who is now enjoying the fruits of a career he freely admits he stumbled into, Is This Thing On? does a beautiful job of exploring how one very lost man finds out life might have surprises and fulfilling moments left for him yet.
At the same time as Alex is finding a renewed sense of self, Tess is returning to her roots as an Olympic-level volleyball player, embarking on a coaching career that soon sees her achieving success on par with her playing years.
But Is This Thing On? is also at heart an exploration of what happens when a marriage dies and then unexpectedly come back to life again, and much of what drives this quietly powerful, sweet and funny and starkly honest movie is seeing how Alex and Tess renegotiate that they mean to each other, and what life means to them as individuals and maybe, possibly, who knows as a couple.
Key to this relationship renaissance is Alex’s discovery of the therapeutic effects of stand-up comedy and the weirdly intimate way comics share the most deeply personal stuff with a room of complete strangers, and while Is This Thing On? doesn’t talk about the real-life Bishop embarked on alongside his stand-up comedy confessions, it does emphasise how the act of talking things through served him well and ultimately saved his marriage.
The real power of Is This Thing On? is its depiction of how life can surprise and change in situations where you least expect it.
Certainly Alex, like Bishop, is happily blindsided during a deeply sad period for him, to discover another side to himself and to then find out that there’s a flow-on effect to who he is, now renewed with his wife and their friends, Balls and Christine (Bradley Cooper and Andra Day) and husbands Stephen and Geoffrey (Sean Hayes and real life spouse Scott Icenogle), and Alex’s sweetly offbeat parents, Jan and Marilyn (Ciarán Hinds and Christine Ebersole respectively).
In conversations that are quietly hushed and authentic and sometimes furiously, if briefly loud, Is This Thing On? navigates the twists and turns of a newly-changed life situation that suggests one outcome but to everyone’s uncertain yet happy surprise becomes something else entirely, returning to what it was in some respects but wholly different in other necessary ways.
Performance across the board are exemplary, with Arnett and Dern in particular evoking what it is life for two people to think they have reached the end of the road only to find its takes another path completely.
Is This Thing On? is proof positive that big “E” emotional films don’t have to go off with the power and presence of a fireworks display and that like life itself, the most path-changing of moments can take place in the small places where life is being lived and that what we think might be the end of something, might in fact be the start of something altogether new and yet familiar and the beginning of a new road in life that holds plenty of happy surprises yet.
The real story of John Bishop, the man who inspired the movie …