NYFF: Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? Keeps the Stage Small and the Feelings Big

It would be easy to open this review with a joke about how the premise of Is This Thing On?, Bradley Cooper’s refreshingly small-scale domestic dramedy, is basically “Men Will Literally Do Anything But Go To Therapy: The Movie.” But while recently divorced would-be comedian Alex Novak (an utterly believable Will Arnett) is absolutely treating each set like a free therapy session, I found myself—a woman who is currently in therapy—feeling a bit too seen to write it off that easily. Because, unfortunately for both myself and my therapist, I (much like Alex) can’t quite discern the difference between stand-up and therapy. The blurriness of the line between the two does make some sense, though: Stand-up has become increasingly confessional in recent years, and if you’ve done enough therapy, you’ve probably told the same stories so many times they start to feel like bits.

What’s refreshing about Is This Thing On?, though, is that it doesn’t actually treat stand-up as therapy—or therapy as stand-up.  The movie has no illusions about Alex being good at comedy (which makes Arnett’s performance all the more impressive, considering he’s one of the funniest actors of the past few decades), nor does it frame him as humiliatingly bad. He’s not Mrs. Maisel, and he’s not Dee Reynolds either. He’s just a middle-aged guy in mild crisis who found a hobby. Not salvation, not a shortcut to fame, just something that brings him a small, stubborn, stupid joy in a year otherwise devoid of it.

It’s a kind of modest realism that feels almost radical in a Cooper film, considering the grandiosity of A Star Is Born and Maestro—though buying that Alex first got onstage purely to dodge a $15 cover charge does require some suspension of disbelief. Cooper isn’t interested in diagnosing Alex’s impulse to overshare so much as watching it with the fond embarrassment reserved for someone you love doing something earnestly dumb. His jokes about his family, his divorce, his misery play less like failure than tail-wagging sincerity that makes you wince and smile at the same time. For the most part, anyway. There are some painful crashouts—but hey, he’s only human!

Despite its premise, the film isn’t particularly interested in the mechanics of comedy, or even in whether Alex ever gets good at it. The club scenes—claustrophobic, dimly lit, full of nervous amateurs—are less about jokes than proximity: Alex fumbling toward community, or maybe just contact. Cooper keeps the camera tight on Arnett’s face, the crowd’s reactions registering only as background noise. What matters is the discomfort and release—the flickering recognition that talking about your life in public isn’t the same as understanding it, but it can make you feel a little less alone.

The real subject is what happens offstage: the gravitational pull between Alex and his ex-wife Tess (an unsurprisingly excellent Laura Dern), who mildly and mutually agree to get divorced in the film’s first five minutes, mid-toothbrushing. Cooper skips the procedural beats—no therapy sessions, no divorce papers—landing instead in the messy afterlife of a marriage that refuses to resolve cleanly. What lingers are the small, unguarded moments. Cooper shoots their conversations with handheld looseness: soft light, overlapping dialogue, pauses that last a beat longer than comfort allows. It’s in those pauses that the film finds its pulse.

Dern and Arnett’s chemistry is the movie’s anchor. They play off each other with a casual, well-worn ease that suggests years of shared in-jokes and resentments; every exchange carries traces of old rhythms they can’t quite shake. There’s a spark that flares even when they’re needling each other, and Cooper wisely lets their scenes breathe—capturing the odd tenderness of two people who know exactly how to hurt each other and, maybe because of that, how to comfort each other too. It’s not the fiery volatility of Marriage Story or the icy remove of Scenes from a Marriage, but something softer and recognizable: the dull warmth of people still half in love out of habit.