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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.”
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.”
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Stephen Garrett
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