Is This Thing On Review

by Cineman and Morgan Morris

Editor’s Note: The second half of this review contains spoilers.

CINEMAN

Is This Thing On? is the latest film by Bradley Cooper, starring Will Arnett and Laura Dern, and it arrives with a very specific kind of confidence. From the poster onwards, Cooper seems to be planting a flag, signalling his interest in a lineage of raw, actor-driven, emotionally intimate cinema. It’s hard not to think of John Cassavetes, a comparison the film almost invites.

At its core, this is a film about marriage coming apart, and the quiet devastation that follows. It’s raw, emotional, and driven by strong, often painfully honest dialogue. This is a film made for grown-ups, and it doesn’t apologise for that. In fact, that’s part of what makes it feel like a unicorn. We see so few low-to-mid budget, adult dramas like this on the big screen anymore, let alone ones that trust performance and conversation over spectacle.

Will Arnett gives a surprisingly vulnerable and stripped-back performance as Alex, a man staring down middle age, divorce, and a creeping sense of irrelevance. His foray into the New York stand-up comedy scene becomes a coping mechanism, a way to feel alive again. Arnett is excellent here, raw and exposed in a way we don’t often see from him. But crucially, Laura Dern’s Tess is never sidelined. This isn’t his story alone. The film understands that the collapse of a marriage is a shared trauma, and Dern is masterful in capturing the accumulated weight of sacrifice, resentment, and love. This really is a two-hander, and the film is stronger for it.

The supporting characters are also thoughtfully drawn, each serving a specific emotional function rather than existing as filler. Cooper even pops up himself in a small role, playing what initially feels like a clown, but gradually reveals itself to be something closer to a sage.

My main issue lies in expectation. The trailers sell this as a film about stand-up comedy, and while the opening does spend time in that world, the film quickly reveals it’s far more interested in the marriage than the mic. I would have loved a deeper dive into that comedy scene, and I couldn’t quite let go of that disappointment.

Stylistically, nothing here is flashy. It often feels closer to a play or an intimate character study. The direction is safe but effective, with a few restrained flourishes that never distract from the performances.

Overall, this is a solid, rewarding cinema experience. Just go in expecting a mature, emotionally grounded film about marriage and identity, not a late-in-life stand-up comedy origin story.

Cineman’s Rating: 8/10

MORGAN MORRIS

HERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD: A downcast finance guy going through an amicable but painful divorce tiredly stumbles into a club one night, signing up for its open mic night as he doesn’t have the required cover fee to get in.

To his surprise, his improvised routine – on his looming divorce, and how much he misses his wife and kids – goes down better than he imagined with a sympathetic audience. He’s encouraged by other comedians to come back. Not so much because he’s great at it, but because he connects with his audience. So come back he does. Repeatedly. First as therapy, but then because he actually gets good at it.

One night, unbeknownst to him, his soon-to-be ex-wife, getting on with her own life as well, by sheer chance finds herself in the club where he’s headlining for the first time. She stays for his act. It’s painful and embarrassing stuff, and he’s harsh on her at times. But seeing him on the stage, as she tells him immediately afterwards, reminded her of the man she had first fallen in love with. They begin talking. And more.

If that premise sounds far-fetched – and the bad set-up for a re-romcom (or comedy or remarriage, as the genre is called) – it’s not really. It’s pretty much exactly what happened to English comedian John Bishop, who went from medical rep to stand-up while dealing with his separation from his wife.

Bishop’s story inspired American actor Will Arnett (most famously of Arrested Development fame) to develop it into a screenplay. Which has now been made into a film directed by Bradley Cooper, who co-wrote the final script with Arnett and British sitcom writer Mark Chappell.

Those credentials may suggest a lot of laughs.

Which there are. But mostly it’s a talky, grown-up love story of two people who clearly still care for each other, but have lost the romance, and maybe the people they thought they were. Or what the other thought they were.

It’s complicated.

Cooper takes a straightforward, no-bells-and-whistles approach to the garrulous goings-on. It’s lean, as compared to, say, another recent troubled-relationship movie ‘Die My Love’, where visionary director Lynne Ramsay mines postpartum depression for visual metaphor and resonance.

Fortunately, the talk of Is This Thing On? never feels too stagey. If only because it’s sugared by an array of locations and touching, controlled performances by its leads, Arnett (Alex) and Laura Dern (Tess). Another redeeming feature is that despite all the masculine energy that went into the film, we are often taken into Tess’ world.

The joy of the film is that the maybe rekindling of romance at a club is but the start of the characters trying to heal their relationship. They still face a few uphills, not least that they have to deal with the messier marriage of some close friends, played gamefully by Andra Day, Oscar nominated for her performance as Billy Holiday in The United States vs Billie Holiday; and Cooper, having the time of his life as an actor suffering from a bad case of arrested development).

Is This Thing On? doesn’t have the pizzazz or the marketing muscle of the slate of films currently making hay on the awards circuit. But the accolades it had been nominated for, or won, point to the pedigree of the film, and to the audiences who would most enjoy it – people who don’t mind mature films about mature people.

So Arnett and Dern were up for best screen couple at the 2025 Women Film Critics Circle Awards. And 59-year-old Dern got the best actress nod at the glitzy AARP Movies for Grownups Awards (George Clooney was there, to pick up his best actor award), presented by an ‘interest group’ celebrating films made by and for grownups.

Is This Things On? fits the bill in all the right ways.

Morgan’s Rating: 7/10

Overall Team Rating: 7.5/10

Is This Thing On? releases in theatres on 06 February 2026.

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