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  • Will Arnett and Andra Day On Midlife Reckonings and Movies Without Villains

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    Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Laura Dern and Andra Day at a special Q&A panel at Angelika Film Center in advance of the film’s theatrical release. Photo by John Nacion/Getty Images for Searchlight Pictures

    A flailing relationship is no joke—unless you’re Alex Novak (Will Arnett), who stumbles into personal salvation by cracking wise in front of a live audience. Multi-hyphenate Bradley Cooper’s latest film c?, now playing in theaters nationwide, traces this journey, which begins with Alex’s spur-of-the-moment impulse to get up in front of a crowd and emotionally unload. “It’s the first time that he talks about what he’s going through,” Arnett told Observer. “It’s kind of the first time he admits it to himself.”

    What triggers the confessional is a still-fresh separation from longtime wife Tess (Laura Dern), after 20 years of marriage (and 5 years as a couple before that). A quarter-century together will change anyone—moving to the suburbs, having kids, sacrificing professional goals for familial stability. The real question is how to acknowledge that change in each other without falling apart.

    Arnett, who co-wrote the script with his writing partner Mark Chappell and Cooper, came up with the idea for the film after hearing the origin story behind British comedian John Bishop, who unexpectedly started his career in comedy—and saved his marriage—by turning his estrangement from his wife into comic fodder that became a catalyst for personal change.

    “It’s a midlife catharsis, not a crisis,” explained Cooper at a press screening before Is This Thing On?, which premiered as the Closing Night Film of the New York Film Festival. “This movie’s not about a guy who’s unhappy in his profession. It’s that he’s not really comfortable with who he is.”

    Arnett echoed the sentiment during his talk with Observer. “We don’t see Alex at work, for instance,” he said. “We don’t see any of that stuff. What was important to us was really getting down to him trying to find his voice. And by that I don’t mean his comedic voice, but his voice as a person—to see him start to connect the dots and be able to actually speak.”

    A man wearing a white shirt stands on stage holding a microphone, illuminated by green and red stage lights as he performs a stand-up comedy routine.A man wearing a white shirt stands on stage holding a microphone, illuminated by green and red stage lights as he performs a stand-up comedy routine.
    Will Arnett in Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

    Is This Thing On? is both a thematic continuation and a pivot for Cooper, whose trajectory as a writer-director-actor-producer includes his splashy Lady Gaga vehicle A Star Is Born and the ambitious Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. Both of those were big-budget productions that, at heart, were relationship dramas writ large. Is This Thing On? compresses that canvas and trades studio spectacle for low-budget intimacy.

    Intrigued by the story’s possibilities, Cooper—who has known Arnett for almost 30 years and even was his roommate in L.A. as their careers were getting off the ground—offered to join Arnett and Chappell to explore the script’s characters further with a rewrite. He then added himself to the cast (in a small role as a Falstaffian goofball buddy nicknamed Balls) and brought together a terrific ensemble, .including Academy Award winner Dern; Andra Day as Balls’s frustrated wife; Arnett’s Smartless podcast cohost Sean Hayes as his newlywed friend (coupled with Scott Icenogle); plus Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds as Alex’s parents. Amy Sedaris and Peyton Manning pop up in smaller roles, and stand-up legend Dave Attell even makes an appearance.

    Cooper and his collaborators pulled together the film very quickly and shot almost entirely on location in New York last spring over 33 tight days, getting it edited in time to premiere at the NYFF in the fall. “New York is a treasure chest and very, very little was shot on a stage,” said Cooper, a native Philadelphian who relished being back in the downtown neighborhood where he spent time as a grad student in places like the Comedy Cellar and Bar Six (both of which play key roles in the film). Alex’s apartment is on 12th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, right on the same street where Cooper got his MFA at the New School.

    “It was a small budget,” said Cooper, who often served as his own camera operator. “That shot of him crossing Sixth Avenue? I’m on a seatbelt on a dolly handheld with nothing shut off from the street. That’s all actual traffic. And there’s just the cop there. We’re like, ‘Is it okay?’ ‘Yeah, you got ten minutes.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, okay!’”

    But that run-and-gun indie vibe was inspirational for the cast. “It’s like Christmas on steroids!” said Dern at the NYFF press screening, and then invoked her longtime professional relationship with David Lynch. “Inland Empire was the only other experience I had where my director was right there with the camera. Bradley, as an actor and as our family, knows us so well and feels the instincts with us in character. The most fun of your life is to be in it and feel an instinct as an actor that you catch up to after the take is done, and you go, ‘Oh man, maybe I should try this…’”

    Arnett was even further in uncharted territory, handling a dramatic role while surrounded by Oscar-caliber talent. “For me, that was a lot of the work,” he said. “To just be present in those moments and be open and vulnerable. These kinds of roles never came my way,” said the actor best known for indelible turns like being Job in Arrested Development or the voice of Lego Batman. “But, also, I did it to myself. I’ve heard people say that I got typecast. Well, I didn’t have to do all the things I did. I had fun doing them—but certainly to do something like this is much closer to what I’d always wanted to do.”

    Day, an Oscar-nominated actress better known as a Grammy Award-winning singer, plays a small but larger-than-life role in the film as Christine, an unhappy wife simmering with marital discontent. She has a seminal scene with Arnett when Christine hilariously confronts Alex about the rage she feels toward him. “She tells him straight up, ‘I despise you because I hate myself. You remind me of me’,” she told Observer, laughing. “Let’s see what you’re going to do now with that truth!”

    But that interaction speaks to a greater truth: the film has no villains, only people who are adrift and unable to communicate with each other. “She’s not a victim,” said Day about her character. “She’s not blaming everyone else. She’s like, ‘What am I passionate about? What do I love? Well, shit, maybe I’m pissed at myself!’ You know what I mean? I love that the movie talks about this theme of grace. We have to transform as people in order to actually have a pulse and be alive. We need to have grace to allow other people to transform.”

    Dern echoed those same feelings at the NYFF press screening. “The film finds the unbelievable complexity of relationships. I hadn’t seen a script or a film allowing us to know that we don’t know how we got here. Because most of us don’t, in moments of despair, in one’s self and in relationship.”

    And for Arnett, as the lead in this marital reckoning, Is This Thing On? was truly transformative. “It was a difficult task for me,” he said. “I did have to recalibrate and remember why I started doing this in the first place. Making a movie like this was how I always envisioned my life going when I was a young man. For me, it was kind of like a rebirth in a way, as opposed to a new thing. It was just reconnecting to something I always wanted to do.”

    Will Arnett and Andra Day On Midlife Reckonings and Movies Without Villains

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    Stephen Garrett

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  • Screening at NYFF: Bradley Cooper’s ‘Is This Thing On?’

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    Will Arnett. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

    Bradley Cooper’s third feature after Maestro and A Star is Born—the divorce-and-stand-up dramedy Is This Thing On?—departs from the musical focus of his previous efforts but, like them, comes achingly close to being great. The actor-director is three-for-three when it comes to films about art and artistry that just come up short, while displaying enough thoughtful flourishes to convince you he’ll create a masterpiece down the line. Sadly, today is not that day, but the result remains perfectly entertaining.

    The story, penned by Cooper, Mark Chappell, and the movie’s lead actor will arnett, begins with dour finance man Alex Novak (Arnett) and his anxious homemaker wife Tess (Laura Dern) mutually deciding to separate. It’s a spontaneous moment seemingly informed by lengthy consideration off-screen, and while this framing provides little context as to their reasons, the movie opens up space for both characters to re-litigate their relationship in some unique and enticing ways. The couple’s ten-year-old boys readily accept the amicable separation, even if it means splitting their time between Tess in their suburban home and Alex in his new bachelor pad in Manhattan. However, in order to cope with the unexpected grief of the situation, Alex finds himself—at first by happenstance and then by intent—at various open mic nights at New York’s Comedy Cellar, letting his troubles pour out of him in the form of some decidedly average stand-up. It’s an experiment he keeps close to his chest, like a dirty secret, the gradual reveal of which makes for some fun situational comedy.

    Cooper and cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera remains tethered to Alex’s uncomfortable close-ups for most of his sets as he finds ways to turn his impending divorce into fodder for his act and learns the ropes from more seasoned comics in scenes filled with snappy wit. All the while, he and Tess remain in each other’s orbit and gradually navigate the awkward complications of remaining close despite going their separate ways. At first, Is This Thing On? plays like the tale of an artist discovering his hidden talent, but while Alex’s routine gestures at catharsis, it seldom helps him address his avoidant personality—or the lingering tensions that prevent him and Tess from figuring out their new dynamic. After all, men will literally [insert hobby here] instead of going to therapy.

    A man and a woman sit facing each other in a dimly lit wooden room, appearing to argue or have an intense conversation on a bed.A man and a woman sit facing each other in a dimly lit wooden room, appearing to argue or have an intense conversation on a bed.
    Will Arnett and Laura Dern. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

    The supporting characters around the couple weave in and out of focus, between Alex’s loving parents (Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds) and a litany of married pals, including Cooper himself as a floundering actor named Balls. Unfortunately, these B-plots tend to feel more intrusive than informative, especially when Cooper keeps the camera running—often on himself—for extended periods that reveal little about the characters and move the story even less. Still, they’re idiosyncratic enough to be amusing, even if Cooper could afford to leave some of his riffing on the cutting room floor.

    However, when Will and Tess are the movie’s focus, there’s no end to its audiovisual delights. Cooper moves between scenes with furious momentum; one uproarious transition in particular makes literal the idea of bringing domestic woes to the stage, while James Newberry’s jazzy score creates numerous anxious crescendos at every turn. His commitment to capturing drama in real time yields engaging and side-splitting dialogue scenes, where the camera—although it oscillates noticeably between its leads without cutting away—affords his actors the chance to dig deep into the uncertainties underlying their confident, personable façades. These are polite masks they wear before one another, even during pleasant interactions, if it means never letting slip that they might blame themselves for their breakup. But as Alex explores stand-up and Tess tries to get back to her former career as a volleyball coach (with the help of an acquaintance played naturalistically by former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning), the duo also explores a complicated friends-with-benefits dynamic, while the question of whether they’ll ever admit their faults to themselves—let alone each other—continues to loom.

    IS THIS THING ON? ★★★ (3/4 stars)
    Directed by: Bradley Cooper
    Written by: Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Mark Chappell
    Starring: Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Andra Day, Bradley Cooper, Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds
    Running time: 120 mins.

    The thorny evolution of the couple’s relationship speaks to an artistic desire to solve some kind of riddle that has no easy answer. Cooper and Arnett have both been through divorces themselves, and the movie captures vignettes of reality in energetic spurts, especially in isolated moments where the lead characters grow more worried, frustrated, or aggrieved, sometimes all at once. As a performance piece, Is This Thing On? is unimpeachable, and results in surprising despondency from Arnett and remarkable work from Dern, whose silent reactions and introspections speak louder than words. However, the adrenaline of the movie’s drama tends to wane the longer it goes on without a real objective in mind. It’s a film that ultimately has too many open questions without the dramatic rigor to justify them, even when its plot wraps up neatly (albeit too quickly and conveniently).

    In a broader sense, one has to wonder if Cooper has taken criticisms of his preceding work to heart. “No one wants an Oscar as badly as Bradley Cooper,” wrote Alex Abad-Santos for Vox, in a piece that also refers to him as a “try-hard.” It’s just one of several such sentiments that tend to accompany his writer-director-actor-producer (and occasionally singer) ventures, although this time, he’s mostly removed himself from the equation on screen and diverted his focus away from music altogether. This is unfortunately at odds with the kind of visual verve he usually brings to his movies. I also wrote in 2023 that he should just direct a musical already, a sentiment that holds true here as well, given how purposefully he moves his camera around each performer, creating enrapturing rhythms even when the movie’s other pieces don’t necessarily fit.

    I tend to disagree with assessments like Abad-Santos’s, given how much of Cooper’s output is laced with emotional sincerity, whether or not his end goal is some intimate emotional purging or simply winning a trophy. Then again, in the intensely rendered but chaotic A Star Is Born, the more cogent but reserved Maestro, and now the more focused but less ambitious Is This Thing On?—all tales of artists finding themselves by opening up their veins and showing audiences what pours out—is there really a difference between the desire for catharsis and major accolades? Cooper’s latest is clearly the output of someone who has been through personal anguish, and like Alex Novak, he attempts to use his pain as the basis for not just something healing but something hilarious, albeit something deeply imperfect, too.

    Screening at NYFF: Bradley Cooper’s ‘Is This Thing On?’

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    Siddhant Adlakha

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