Bradley Cooper (2025)
It’s on a smaller scale than A Star Is Born (2018) and Maestro (2023), and less impressive than either, but Is This Thing On?, Bradley Cooper’s third directing effort, is also the third film he’s made that’s well worth seeing. This marital comedy-drama is set in present-day New York. Alex Novak (Will Arnett) has a job in finance. His homemaker wife Tess (Laura Dern) was once on the US Olympic volleyball team. After twenty years of marriage, the couple, who have two sons, decide to separate – amicably but, especially from Alex’s point of view, unhappily. Once he moves out, Alex and Tess both start to change their lives in other ways. Tess takes the opportunity to get back into the sport she loves, as a coach. Alex’s new direction is more accidental and, for quite a while, furtive. On a glum visit to the Comedy Cellar club in Greenwich Village, he finds he doesn’t have cash on him to pay the cover charge so gets in by putting his name down for that night’s open-mic session. When his turn comes, he’s tongue-tied until he starts talking about the end of his marriage. Alex returns to the stage of the Comedy Cellar a second time, and a third. His jokes about separation and solitude become a well-received comedy routine – which, for Alex, is also a means of talking to someone about the sadness of being single again. By the end of Is This Thing On?, he and Tess are back together.
The screenplay, by Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett and Mark Chappell, is inspired by what happened to British comedian John Bishop (who told Arnett, a friend, about it and receives a story credit on the film). Born in Liverpool in 1966, Bishop spent a big chunk of his early working life at a pharmaceutical company where he rose to a senior position. He married in 1993; seven years later, by which time they had three children, he and his wife split up. One night, Bishop went to the Frog and Bucket comedy club in Manchester and put his name down for the open mic to avoid paying the £4 entrance fee. He went down well with the audience – all seven of them – and was invited back. He was soon doing a weekly gig at the club, talking about marital failure: one regular joke was that he missed his wife so much he kept her severed head in the fridge. He and she reconciled and are still together. (Bishop gave up his corporate job and took up comedy full-time in 2006. Within a few years, he was Britain’s highest-paid comedian.)
I’m assuming John Bishop isn’t well known in America but, for this British viewer, he’s one of two important reasons for my reservations about Will Arnett’s protagonist in Is This Thing On? I kept hearing Bishop’s voice behind Alex’s in the Comedy Cellar and thinking what a difference Bishop’s performing style would have made, his natural vitality a counterpoint to his doleful script. Bishop has described his Frog and Bucket slot as a form of counselling; the trouble is, Alex on stage looks and sounds as if he really is in therapy and isn’t very funny – even though Arnett’s a highly successful comedian and comic actor across the Atlantic. (I hadn’t seen him before.) The second main reason why he’s underwhelming is Bradley Cooper, not the director but the performer. In A Star Is Born and Maestro, Cooper directed himself in a starring role; in Is This Thing On?, he takes, on camera, something of a back seat but still upstages his leading man.
Despite the success of both films, Cooper faced criticism for ego-tripping in A Star Is Born and Maestro. In addition to directing and playing the lead, he co-wrote the screenplay for each and, in A Star Is Born, sang country-rock numbers solo as well as duets with Lady Gaga. The case against Cooper wasn’t that his acting or direction or (co-)writing wasn’t up to scratch – rather, that he shouldn’t be doing all three things in the same film, which made his detractors seem merely envious of his range of talents. Did this negative press influence Cooper’s decision to restrict himself to a supporting part in his third film? There might well have been other factors involved. He may reasonably have felt that a proven comedian was the best man for the job. Even he may have decided there was only so much he could do on one project: in Is This Thing On?, Cooper makes his debut as a camera operator, working alongside DP Matthew Libatique. (He also has a producing credit, as he did on A Star Is Born and Maestro.) But it’s hard to ignore the fact that in this latest film Cooper plays a middle-aged hipster actor whose name is Balls and whose high opinion of himself seems not to be shared by others in the business.
Outside the Comedy Cellar, Balls is the film’s most clear-cut comedy turn, and Cooper, as he showed most recently in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2022), is a brilliant comic actor. He’s very funny as Balls rattles on – about how he outshone an actor he’d understudied and briefly deputised for, about how well he’s done to get a fourth callback for a tiny role. Even in hirsute semi-disguise, Cooper has far more charisma than Will Arnett, who’s competent and likeable in the offstage parts of Is This Thing On?, but no more than that. It doesn’t help that Arnett, in profile at least, bears a passing resemblance to Cooper. Alex and Balls are meant to be old friends; for a while, though, I was under the mistaken impression they were brothers – especially since they pair up believably with Ciarán Hinds, who plays Alex’s father (Christine Ebersole plays his mother). It doesn’t help Arnett either that there’s nothing of Alex in his day job on Wall Street or wherever. If there were, we’d at least see the character in another environment, where he’s presumably still managing to function well enough, despite his miserable personal life. We get occasional shots of him in suit and tie, arriving at what used to be home to pick up his kids (well played by Blake Kane and Calvin Knegten) for an outing or weekend – but Alex’s mood in these bits is his usual droll despondency.
Laura Dern, a naturally plausible ex-volleyballer thanks to her height, has a much better role here than her other recent one, in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Is This Thing On? switches up a gear from downbeat naturalism when Tess meets up in Manhattan with volleyball coach Laird (Peyton Manning) – a meeting ostensibly to discuss her coaching ambitions but also partly, at least as Tess sees it, a date. She has told Laird that she and Alex have split before they move from one bar to another – the Comedy Cellar, just in time for Alex’s performance: Tess hears herself talked about to a sizeable, laughingly appreciative audience. This, too, is part of what happened to John Bishop: according to Wikipedia, he’d just delivered the fridge joke when ‘he realised his wife was in the audience, while they were in the final stages of their divorce proceedings. After the gig, they ended up chatting and reconciled as she was reminded of his earlier, funnier self’. In Cooper’s film, Tess’s fury with Alex – who rushes out to the street to apologise – quickly dissipates: she and Alex spend the night together.
This is the start of a secret liaison that Alex and Tess both enjoy, until it’s stopped in its tracks during a weekend away with Balls, his bitterly unhappy wife (Andra Day) and two gay male friends. An estranged married couple rekindling a mutual passion has done service in romantic comedy from The Philadelphia Story (1941) to, and probably beyond, It’s Complicated (2009). Although this time it’s based-on-a-true-story, Alex and Tess’s renewed romance turns Is This Thing On? into a more conventional film – but a more easily entertaining one, too. It stays that way to the end. After their weekend falling out, Alex tries to mend things by insisting to Tess that he wasn’t unhappy with their relationship but, rather, during their relationship: he wants, he says, to be unhappy with Tess. It may not be a tempting offer but does, at last, make sense of Will Arnett’s portrait of Alex. In time-honoured romcom tradition, the final scene sees Alex make a dash to his sons’ school – just in time to join Tess in the audience watching the boys in a band performing ‘Under Pressure’, and to go into a conclusive embrace with his ex-ex-wife.
In the closing stages, Alex wears a Liverpool FC shirt, evidently a nod to John Bishop (though it turns out Will Arnett is a Liverpool supporter too, and that Alex’s sleeveless red top is so tight because Arnett has owned it since he was a kid). Although I missed Bishop’s comic presence, relocating the story from North-West England to New York City isn’t in itself a problem, and the Comedy Cellar backstage sequences are nicely done – with, among others, Amy Sedaris as the club emcee, and Chloe Radcliffe and Jordan Jensen as comedians Nina and Jill respectively (Alex has a one-night stand with Jill). Updating the action from 2000 to now has consequences, of course. A minor plus is that Tess can be appointed assistant coach for the US women’s volleyball team at the Los Angeles Olympics in two years’ time, a negative that Alex’s routine is more PC-circumspect than John Bishop’s may have been. If the severed head gets a mention in the film I missed it. Bradley Cooper’s latest has plenty going for it – including a neat title that picks up on the traditional mic-tapping refuge of the stand-up desperate for a laugh, as well as the doubtful status of Alex and Tess’s life together. But Is This Thing On? could use a few more off-colour jokes.
12 February 2026
