FILM OF THE WEEK: Is This Thing On?

Bradley Cooper’s work as a director has been shaped by a persistent fascination with performance, not as spectacle or ambition, but as a psychological condition: a way of surviving intimacy, loss and self-doubt. From A Star Is Born, with its arena lights and suffocating fame, to Maestro, a film obsessed with genius, legacy and the costs of devotion to art, Cooper has repeatedly returned to characters whose inner lives are inseparable from what they create and how they are seen. His films have often unfolded on grand stages, saturated with music, movement and mythmaking. Beneath that scale has been a quieter interest in love as negotiation, and in the damage that occurs when personal identities are swallowed by roles, marriages and expectation.

With Is This Thing On?, Cooper narrows the lens. Gone are the stadiums and symphony halls, replaced by low ceilings, folding chairs and the anxious hush of open-mic nights. The shift is not merely aesthetic but philosophical. This is a film about art without glamour, ambition or certainty, and a man discovering not how to become exceptional, but how to feel present in his own life again. In doing so, Cooper offers his most intimate work to date, a modest dramedy that asks what happens to love when two people mistake their individual discontent for the failure of their marriage.

The film opens with the quiet dismantling of a marriage. Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess (Laura Dern), together for two decades and parents to two young sons, are separating, with Alex moving into a typically sad and unfurnished ‘Divorced Dad’ apartment. One evening, newly alone and drifting after the separation, he wanders into a bar and impulsively signs up for an open-mic slot, motivated less by artistic yearning than by the desire to avoid paying the venue’s cover charge.

That small, almost accidental decision becomes the film’s hinge. Alex’s first performance is clumsy and rambling, his jokes tentative and undercooked. Yet something about the experience stirs him. Stand-up comedy does not offer escape so much as permission, a space where confusion, resentment and vulnerability can be spoken aloud. As he continues returning to the stage, the pursuit gradually becomes a lifeline - not because he shows exceptional talent, but because it reconnects him to a sense of self that had long been dormant.

The film is loosely based on the life of UK comedian John Bishop, who was a pharmaceutical rep before a separation inspired him to try a comedy open mic. T+his isn’t a biopic, but instead a dramedy about love, marriage and identity. It suggests that many marriages do not collapse because love has vanished, but because individuality has. Passions are deferred, creative instincts abandoned, and personal dissatisfaction begins to masquerade as romantic failure. As Alex rediscovers something that belongs solely to him, he also begins to see Tess more clearly, not as the source of his unhappiness but as another person whose own identity has been eroded by years of compromise.

Arnett is charming and likeable, playing Alex as a man with sadness and a decent heart who stumbles and wants to do better. Laura Dern plays Tess with sharpness and restraint, a woman carrying grief alongside resolve. The film suggests that much of the rupture between her and Alex has been driven by the slow erosion of her own identity, shaped by years of IVF, motherhood, and the quiet disappearance of the ambitious athlete she once was. Tess is not angry so much as unseen, fearful that her most meaningful achievements belong irretrievably to the past.

One of the film’s most perceptive moments arrives when Alex shows their sons a photograph of Tess in her youth as an Olympic volleyball player, believing he is celebrating her brilliance. Tess reacts with unexpected hurt, asking why he could not show them an image of who she is now. It is a subtle exchange that taps into ageing, gender, achievement, and being witnessed within long relationships.

This exchange also exemplifies the film’s recurring frustration: the insight is introduced with clarity, then hurried past before it can fully reshape the emotional arc. When Alex’s shortcomings are examined, they are more often described than dramatised. Tess recounts the ways she felt unseen, but the film seldom lingers long enough in the past to allow those patterns to accrue real weight. This tendency toward explanation rather than embodiment recurs throughout the narrative, and lessens its emotional weight.

Cooper’s direction is most assured during the stand-up sequences. The camera follows Alex onto the stage and remains close to his face, capturing the glare of the spotlight, the oppressive silence when jokes fail, his relief when rhythm briefly emerges. These scenes understand comedy as exposure rather than performance, and Cooper wisely resists the fantasy of rapid success. Alex progresses from awkward five-minute sets to slightly less awkward ten-minute ones, never becoming especially good, only braver.

Elsewhere, however, the film struggles to integrate Alex’s artistic awakening with the emotional unravelling of his marriage. It shifts restlessly between his progress as a comedian and his attempts to rebuild intimacy with Tess, often before either thread has fully settled. Some tropes arrive on schedule: Tess appears unnoticed in the club while Alex performs material about their sex life; on another night, he uses his set to emotionally explode in a way that’s awkward and oversharing.

Despite its unevenness, Is This Thing On? contains a genuine emotional maturity. It recognises the toll of IVF and caregiving, the ways women’s ambitions are quietly postponed, and the slow erosion of identity that can occur within long marriages. It understands that intimacy often falters not through betrayal, but through exhaustion, miscommunication, and the belief that personal unhappiness must belong to someone else.

By the film’s conclusion, Alex and Tess occupy a different emotional register. We understand the insights they have gained and the fragments they have recovered, but the film stops short of showing the labour required to transform recognition into repair. The pieces are present, but the assembly remains largely offscreen.

What lingers instead is a portrait of marriage as an evolving negotiation between two people attempting to reclaim themselves without abandoning each other. Is This Thing On? may not always trust its strongest moments enough to let them breathe, but its compassion is unmistakable. In turning away from spectacle toward the quiet ache of ordinary lives, Cooper delivers his most intimate film yet, one that understands reinvention not as reinvention at all, but as the courage to begin paying attention again.

Directed by Bradley Cooper. Written by Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Mark Chappell. Cinematography by Matthew Libatique. Edited by Charlie Greene.
Starring Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Andra Day, Bradley Cooper, Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds. 124 mins

• In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: