Bradley Cooper is an actor’s director. That was made abundantly clear at a press conference for his new movie Is This Thing On?, premiering as the closing night selection for the New York Film Festival, as his performers spoke effusively about how the closeness of Cooper’s camera, the flow of the film’s shoot, and indie ethos combined to create a feeling of the performers and filmmakers working together as “one big organism,” as Laura Dern put it. Is This Thing On? also marks the first time that Cooper has exercised these techniques for leads that don’t include himself. Cooper’s supporting part in the movie as a bearded, secondary goofball suggests that, in addition to writing and directing, he’s also held the ambition to steal parts away from Jason Mantzoukas. His character is also an actor.
The film’s leads, however, actually drift away from the showbiz environment of Cooper’s first two big-swing features. One of the very first things we learn about Alex Novak (Will Arnett) as the movie opens is that he’s heading toward divorce from his wife Tess (Laura Dern). That information crystallizes far sooner than what it is that either of them does for a living, or how old their two children are. They’re both 10—not born at the same time but “Irish twins,” which is something we learn from Alex’s stand-up routine. Comedy is not, however, Alex’s actual profession; he has some kind of nebulous finance job that’s supposed to be beside the point of his journey, but reads a little like Cooper saying, “I don’t know, people have jobs with money, right?” Alex tries out stand-up on a whim, supposedly to avoid the $15 cover charge at a bar where he just wants to drown a little of his post-split misery. (He’s living nearby in that reverse-NYC miracle, an apartment described as shabby but actually pretty nice, while Tess stays in the suburbs.)
Alex is believably shaky his first time up at an open mic. But he also shows enough of a glimmer of talent, and bares just enough of his soul through a couple of divorce jokes, to suggest a creative breakthrough that’s been a long time coming, whether he realized it or not. He goes back for another shot of that adrenaline, and Cooper smartly depicts how intoxicating even a moderate hit of crowd approval can be under the right circumstances. Working from a screenplay he and Arnett wrote with Mark Chappell, inspired by English comedian John Bishop, Cooper doesn’t throw Alex into a Star Is Born-style rags-to-riches story (not least because Alex is, by most standards, already rich). He doesn’t even quit his job to pursue comedy, and it’s neat to see Cooper working in a less operatic tone, his self-consciously artsy flourishes in support of a story that doesn’t announce its own sober-faced importance. The casting of Arnett matches this scale-down perfectly; he’s naturally funny, yet has enough human frailty to believably play a guy who’s more of a promising talent than a comedic supernova.
Cooper also seems mindful of the potential limits of another story where a middle-aged guy finds his spark again, if not fully certain how to turn Is This Thing On? into his desired marriage story. Tess gets her own storyline, sort of, where she belatedly reclaims some of her lost satisfaction by coaching volleyball, the sport she once played at an Olympic level. But her coaching journey doesn’t have the equivalents of crowded following shots or intimate close-ups in the bustle of the Comedy Cellar on a busy night. It’s mostly an unexplained decade-plus delay in Tess realizing that, hey, sometimes former athletes turn to coaching, and then finding instant success in her new field.
As insufferable as it might have been to eavesdrop on too many real-life comics plying their trade alongside and offering insider wisdom to Arnett’s enthusiastic newbie, that milieu is also where Is This Thing On? feels most electric, even unpredictable once it’s clear, early on, that this won’t end with Alex getting that Tonight Show gig. When it turns back to the complicated dynamic between Alex and Tess, Arnett and Dern are both excellent. (Somewhat perversely, Arnett might get more credit just for being an often-comic actor holding his own opposite an always-great Oscar winner.) What Cooper has to say about the thorniness of marriage, children, and the difficulties of basic human happiness, though, feels a little murky, and not in a rife-with-rich-ambiguities sort of way. Is This Thing On? obviously prides itself in dropping into the action without a lot of exposition, yet Cooper can’t resist circling back for some arguments that fill in those missing details.
At their most clamorous, the family conflicts taste like warmed-over David O. Russell leftovers, without reaching the rococo heights of those films’ wigged-out performances (including Cooper’s in several of them). The lack of genuine messiness makes this one of several recent movies that guides characters through narratives like a therapy session, complete with an end-of-session mixture of neatness and ellipses, along with a sense that the supporting characters are just fodder for intense discussion rather than recognizable humans. Is This Thing On? might come to its healing from an appropriately modest place, but there’s still a bit of actorly grandiosity under its skin.
Director: Bradley Cooper
Writers: Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Mark Chappell
Starring: Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Bradley Cooper, Andra Day
Release Date: October 10, 2025 (New York Film Festival); December 19, 2025 (theaters)
