‘Is This Thing On?’ Review: Will Arnett and Laura Dern Find Meaning in Laughter and Pain

This is our last dance / This is ourselves / Under pressure,” sing Freddie Mercury and David Bowie in the song that surfaces at carefully chosen moments throughout Is This Thing On? Much like the film’s title, the lyrics invite a double reading. The song is rehearsed on instruments played by the children of Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess (Laura Dern) while their parents navigate a separation. Married for twenty years and parents to two ten-year-old boys, Alex and Tess have mutually decided to split. When we first meet them, everything seems reasonable, even civilized. He’s already moved into a smaller place—modest, but with most of what he needs. Schedules and logistics are settled, and aside from the occasional hiccup, things appear to be unfolding along predictable lines.

Bradley Cooper’s third feature as a director can be read as a comedy-drama about divorce, but also as an emotional journey charting how two people move through a marriage in crisis. After A Star Is Born and Maestro—both large-scale, deliberately grand productions—Cooper downshifts and delivers something closer to an indie film: a story about a couple in trouble, their parents, their kids, their friends, and, above all, about the things people do when they don’t quite know what to do.

Alex works in “finance” (one of the film’s weaker points, given its otherwise grounded approach, is that we never actually see or hear much about his job), but his mind is consumed by the separation and everything that comes with it. One night, wandering through Manhattan in a fog after walking his ex-wife to the train—out of sheer habit, he boards it himself, then sheepishly gets off—Alex ducks into a comedy club on MacDougal Street, in the heart of the West Village. He just wants a drink, but the only way to avoid the $15 cover charge is to sign up for open mic night and try his hand at stand-up. The problem is that Alex has never done anything like this before. He’s not a comedian, not an actor, and whether he’s actually funny is something he’ll have to find out in real time.

From the start, it’s obvious he has no idea what he’s doing. And yet his awkward, fumbling attempt at stand-up lands better than expected. The audience connects with him, laughs a little, and responds to his halting efforts to talk about the back-and-forth of his separation. It’s not a good set—his fellow comics will tell him as much, kindly—but it strikes a chord. What people respond to is a mix of tenderness and sadness, and they applaud him anyway. Encouraged, Alex keeps coming back. He discovers a new world that allows him, on the one hand, to socialize with people outside his usual orbit and, on the other, to use the stage as a form of public therapy. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in building a career as a comedian; what he wants is a place to think out loud, to reflect, and to feel less alone while talking about his breakup.

“Is this thing on?” opens up to multiple meanings. Beyond the obvious reference to the microphone, it gestures toward the identity Alex is tentatively adopting as a performer and, more importantly, toward his still-fluid relationship with Tess. As their circle of friends—including Sean Hayes, Andra Day, and Cooper himself as an actor who’s equal parts eccentric and stoned—grapples with its own relationship issues (and comments freely on theirs), Alex and Tess take the necessary distance from each other to begin reassembling their individual identities.

In the film’s second half, Cooper introduces a subtle shift. From that point on, the story moves away from Alex’s personal and emotional reconfiguration and becomes more squarely about the couple as a unit. We follow Tess as she tries to reconnect with her first passion, volleyball—a sport in which she once competed at the Olympic level and to which she now hopes to return as a coach. We also see her tentatively dating again (NFL legend Peyton Manning pops up in a brief cameo), a situation that leads to an awkward encounter and, ultimately, to an unexpected turn in the story.

Is This Thing On? observes its characters’ dilemma with a steady hand and—aside from a few moments—resists overplaying the drama, understanding that humor has always been part of this relationship. In that sense, it’s far less raw than Marriage Story (and even more so than Kramer vs. Kramer), with a noticeably lighter touch. The stand-up world, populated by many real-life comedians, is portrayed affectionately, as a communal space for people in need of connection, support, and the validation of peers and strangers alike. Still, it’s not the film’s true subject so much as a near-therapeutic device that allows Alex (and, really, both of them) to look at what they’re going through from a different angle, with a bit of distance.

A self-professed fan of the long take, Cooper delivers several handheld gems (rumor has it he operated the camera himself): sequences inside comedy clubs with Alex weaving through the room, climbing stairs, slipping between tables before launching into his brief set, as well as moments beyond those cramped stages. One casually beautiful, almost musical scene—in which their group of friends hum Amazing Grace while making breakfast together—is a small treasure. Near the end, as emotions begin to swell, Cooper allows himself to raise the volume too, but crucially stops just short of tipping into excess, something that can be a risk in his work as both director and actor.

Arnett, best known for comedy, is spot-on as Alex, a man who swings from joy to anguish from one scene to the next while also contending with his children’s confusion and fear (there’s a key scene involving the three of them in a car), as well as the blend of understanding and pressure coming from his parents, played by Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds. Dern, by contrast, is less overtly dramatic than in some of her previous roles. Her Tess initially seems to be handling this civilized separation with remarkable composure—until, at a certain point, the wires cross in the least expected way.

Hovering between divorce drama and remarriage comedy, between a story about how art can help us navigate life (a recurring theme in Cooper’s directorial work) and a portrait of fiftysomething men and women confronting midlife crises, Is This Thing On? gradually finds a gentler, more tender, quietly hopeful tone. Near the end, the same Queen and David Bowie song returns in full, and when you hear its chorus, you’ll instantly grasp what the film has been building toward.