Chris Rock can't get out of the title character's way in the fascinating, frustrating Misty Green
Rosalind Eleazar is spectacularly compelling. Chris Rock's direction (and stupid hat) is less so.
Photo: A24
There was a time when plenty of filmmakers competed to create other cities’ versions of a New York-set Woody Allen dramedy: Relationship-based movies that were rueful, witty, and a little self-aggrandizing, evincing a complicated love for the city at hand. Allen’s fellow stand-up-turned-writer-director Chris Rock, never one to roll with perceived cancellations, keeps the faith in this lineage with Misty Green, a Los Angeles character study replete with walk-and-talks, dinner banter, an impressively starry cast, and a multifaceted female lead. That is to say, it lands somewhere between Deconstructing Harry and Blue Jasmine. Depending on one’s feelings for Allen’s work in 2026, that might in turn sound like an experience that lands somewhere between ambitious and unbearable.
There won’t be as much disagreement, however, about Misty Green herself. Rosalind Eleazar, perhaps best known for TV’s Slow Horses, gives a hypnotic central performance as an actress who has found some success in film and television, winning a supporting-actress Emmy some years ago, only to fall on harder times. The movie begins by giving her a strict deadline: She has one week to vacate her luxe apartment, because it’s not actually hers. The true owner is an aggrieved woman whose husband Misty had been sleeping with—until he died. Unfortunately for Misty, she did not get his agreement to give her the apartment in writing, and her best friend and fellow actress (Anna Kendrick) isn’t in the position to help her out with a place to stay.
As her agent (Topher Grace) points out, some of Misty’s problems can be attributed to the institutional sexism and racism that permeates Hollywood. He goes on, however, to say that those conditions alone cannot account for her stalled career. That can be attributed to additional factors, such as stubbornness, defiance, and cocaine, which tends to boost those former two. The movie mostly takes place over Misty’s final week in her apartment, and in that timeframe it’s difficult to tell whether she is a proper addict, simply open to a variety of methods for numbing her pain, or if difference ultimately matters, especially to her. Eleazar, with her powerfully hard stare and occasional moments of unguarded charm, makes Misty a genuinely fascinating, knotty subject regardless of her motivations. She’s also able to summon Misty’s obvious talent at will, delineating clear differences between a half-assed audition and one where she’s bringing the electricity that almost made her a star without obviously altering her volume. (She saves that for when the audition is interrupted; Misty is constitutionally incapable of taking setbacks with gentle good humor.)
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