The Unexpected Charm of Is This Thing On?
What is an “art monster”? Jenny Offill popularized the term in her 2014 debut novel, Dept. of Speculation, in which a youthful writer dreams of eschewing domesticity and becoming an “art monster” entirely motivated by her craft. But it is not just dishwashing, parenting, or, as Offill mentions, the licking of stamps that the typically male art monster delegates. Everything, including basic human decency, might be thrown aside in favor of the Work. This is where Claire Dederer picked up in her 2023 book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. If we concede that the art cannot be separated from the artist—that sometimes callousness is part of the craft, that it leaves traces in the final product—the question remaining is how much monstrousness we can tolerate. As Dederer writes, “A monster, in my mind, was an artist who could not be separated from some dark aspect of his or her biography.” These biographies, in turn, make for horrific journalistic exposés and solid Hollywood entertainment.
Actor turned director Bradley Cooper’s first two films, the 2018 A Star is Born and the 2023 Maestro, look at extraordinary women and the art monsters they love. In the former, singer-songwriter Jackson Maine (Cooper) marries unconventionally beautiful waitress Ally (Lady Gaga) and makes her a star before nearly dragging her down with his alcoholism and all-consuming envy. And the eponymous maestro, Leonard Bernstein (also Cooper), gives his lovely wife (Carey Mulligan) everything except fidelity and a moment’s peace. Charismatic, destructive narcissists, Maine and Bernstein may not be as monstrous as fictional nightmare (and rare female exemplar) Lydia Tár, but they are clingy and distant, self-righteous and messy, and they always hurt the ones they love, as the song goes.
With Cooper’s third directorial feature, Is This Thing On?, he appears poised to continue this streak. Will Arnett plays Alex Novak, a depressed father of two who discovers stand-up comedy in the wake of his impending divorce from his wife, Tess (Laura Dern). Arnett’s two career-defining roles—embittered sitcom star Bojack Horseman and smarmy illusionist Gob Bluth in Arrested Development—prime him to play another art monster, even if his variation on the archetype is more hack than tortured genius.
But Is This Thing On? proves to be a sharp departure from Cooper’s oeuvre and Arnett’s typecasting: Novak, inspired by real-life comic John Bishop, is both gifted and kindhearted. (The film makes a nod to Bishop’s British nationality by making the American Novak an inexplicable Liverpool F.C. fan.) Alex’s comedy career begins after a forced dinner party, when Tess heads home to New Jersey, and Alex, alone in the city, goes for a drink at the Comedy Cellar. Open mic participants don’t have to pay a cover, so, on a pot cookie–sustained whim, he signs up. A depressive “Mrs. Maisel”–esque sequence results: “I think I’m getting a divorce,” he murmurs into the microphone. “What tipped me off is that I’m living in an apartment on my own, and my wife and kids don’t live there. That was probably the biggest clue.”
The club community is exceedingly collegial, sensing, before even he does, that he belongs. “Sad guy, you hanging out?” a woman chirps, and Alex follows. The comics give him advice: Get onstage every night, write it all down, dedicate yourself to your craft. “Hey, love you, young Novak,” one of the Black comics shouts at Alex, who walks off into the night. (That Alex has not one but three underdeveloped Black friends feels like a throwback to a particular kind of ’90s movie about a straight, white wife-guy needing to be convinced of his worth.)
Alex’s value, his inherent goodness, is reiterated fiercely by the people around him, as if the film does not trust the viewer to trust him. In a discussion of his act’s merits, the emcee of the open mic (an underused Amy Sedaris) says, “You’re not naïve, you’re innocent,” while a young comic flirts, “You are good.… I mean, you’re bad at stand-up but … you’re good. You have a good heart.” Later, when his father witnesses an especially angry onstage rant, he intones, wisely, “You’re a decent man, Alex, and you can give yourself the grace to work through all this.”
Alex is not the only well-meaning soul in the mix; his wife is just as sweet and just as lost. Tess is a performer in her own way, her life’s work, volleyball, having taken her to the Olympics years prior. While Alex privately pursues his new passion, Tess debates if and how to return to the work that once defined her, and the two consider, together and separately, if their marriage can be saved. Their diverging ambitions and mutual admiration pull them together and tear them apart, but unlike Marriage Story, a movie with which it has drawn comparisons, there isn’t much in the way of wall-punching. As established, these are nice people.
Too nice? I’ll let Alex and Tess field that one. In one of the couple’s later arguments, Alex insists they should make another try “because we’re doing things that make us happy as individuals now. And if we’re happy, that’s it. Then we make the people we love happy too.” “That’s it? What are you, eight years old?” Tess snaps. “A real relationship is finding somebody you can also be unhappy with.” The film is on her side, but it can’t, rightly or wrongly, shake Alex’s conception of a happy ending. Any road back to each other will require them both to find fulfillment, primarily through the work they do.
In this sense, Is This Thing On? feels less of a piece with Cooper’s directorial turns and more like a spiritual sequel to David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, in which he starred. Instead of ballroom dancing together, the Novaks pursue their own passions; instead of the cozy, drab suburbs of Philadelphia, Is This Thing On? settles into the cozy, drab suburbs of northern New Jersey, complete with wood-paneled kitchens and batty boomer parents. The grand romantic gesture in Silver Linings Playbook—the letter that reads, “I’m sorry it took so long for me to catch up. I just got stuck”—is where Alex needs to get by the end of Act III. And, finally, as in Russell’s film, it is the actors in Is This Thing On? that overcome the script’s weaknesses and make the world of these characters feel real and close.
The movie’s warm, spacious heart lies with Arnett and Dern, the vulnerable performances they turn in, and the care with which they are filmed. The loving attention the movie pays Alex and Tess, and that they pay one another, comes through in the close-ups: how the red and blue backlights settle into the lines on Arnett’s beleaguered face, how a post-practice Dern hops into the front seat of a car and gives Alex a nervous, lingering smile. Only skilled performers like these two could make the following feel dynamic and not contrived: Tess is on a date with a colleague (Peyton Manning) at the Comedy Cellar when Alex stands up for his first non–open mic set. Not seeing Tess in the audience, he talks about his marriage with comfort and candor.
“I gotta tell you, the whole experience, to be honest, made me miss my wife,” he admits. To hear Arnett’s voice, still recognizably the actor’s own but stripped of his trademark sleaze, is affecting, and Alex’s openness brings forth a dozen conflicting emotions in Tess. Sitting in the back with her date, unmoving and hardly blinking, Dern wordlessly plays fury, hurt, shame, even begrudging amusement. “You know when your partner gets really, really quiet,” Alex says, “and now you gotta guess what’s wrong?” As Tess watches silently, processing what she is hearing, it is the viewer’s turn to guess what she might be thinking. When he follows her out of the club, panicked and defensive, she gives up the game. “It’s hot,” she admits before grabbing his cigarette and taking a drag.
Is This Thing On? belongs to Arnett first, and to scene-stealer Dern second, but the director has included a supporting part for himself, and it’s the closest the movie comes to confronting the art monster of his previous films. Balls (Cooper), Alex’s friend from college, is a struggling actor with a taste for marijuana and saying things like, “I can’t choose when my characters leave me.” He eagerly anticipates his big break, even though he is 30 years into a career that is mostly understudy parts and guest television spots. His wife (Andra Day) is miserable, but Balls is oblivious, or just indifferent, to her feelings: “Living with an artist, guys. Living with an artist,” he offers as a meager apology.
Where Cooper once played the art monster for tragedy, now it is for farce, Balls’s role in the proceedings mostly comic relief. When Alex hangs a framed picture of a young, Olympian Tess on the wall of his single-guy apartment, Balls cannot fathom why he would pick this action shot, because it is shot from behind. “I can’t see her face,” Balls remarks. “You should just turn her around.” It’s not how photography works, Alex is quick to remind him. Wise fool that he is, Balls has given Alex the advice his friend most needs to hear.
Might this be the next chapter for the art monster? To take away his ego and power, hand him a joint, and see what insight he has to offer? If anyone is positioned to figure this out, it has to be Cooper and the troupes he assembles in his work.