Early in Bradley Cooper’s “Is This Thing On?” the writer/director/actor performs an epic pratfall.
His character Balls enters the film by face-planting with a carton of oat milk during a staid gathering of friends. It’s a very “Three Stooges” move for a movie that’s more about comedy than it is actual comedy. His spilled milk isn’t even played for laughs.
Cooper isn’t interested in making a comedy, outright, with “This Thing.” Instead, this is the third installment in what could be a trilogy about creativity, the way that art and performance can light a person up from the inside.
When we first meet our protagonist Alex (Will Arnett), he’s staring into middle distance at an elementary school performance. His soon-to-be-ex-wife Tess (Laura Dern) jokes to a group of friends that he’s not alive before the title of the film flashes on screen. Is this man on? Not in the least.
Alex stumbles into comedy — literally. Stoned on a marijuana cookie, he inadvertently signs up for an open mic just to avoid the $15 cover charge at the Comedy Cellar in New York’s West Village where he wants to get a drink. Summoned onstage, he mumbles through some musings about his dissolving marriage for which he is rewarded a few laughs, and suddenly, Alex is hooked. Comedy now his hot new mistress. It becomes a vice, a furtive hobby. Even his admission to Balls is played like a naughty confession.
Alex blossoms under the spotlight, high on attention and validation, Arnett’s micro-expressions studiously captured in an uncomfortable close-up courtesy of cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s roaming hand-held camera. The process is played out in Arnett’s performance, the feedback loop of laughs the dopamine hit that awakens him to the world again. Or maybe it’s just the relief that comes from finally being honest.
The antsy style and cross-cutting that Cooper employs in this scene, as well as Dern’s terrific reactions, make this a show-stopping sequence, and the stranger than fiction circumstances help.
But it’s at this point that Cooper abandons the warm, chummy environment of the Comedy Cellar as he regresses back to his old ways, which includes Tess and their married friends, Balls and his wife Christine (Andra Day), and a gay couple, Stephen and Geoffrey, played by Arnett’s podcast co-host Sean Hayes and his real-life husband Scott Icenogle.
