“Is This Thing On?” Proves Bradley Cooper is a Great Filmmaker (Review)

I think Bradley Cooper is neat.

I’ve long been an appreciator of the multi-hyphenate performer, but I really became a more avid connoisseur of his work in 2018, when he made his directorial debut with his Lady Gaga–starring remake of A Star Is Born. Not only did Cooper deliver an astounding performance as the co-lead, but he also brought a real sense of gravitas, insight, and articulation to the film’s craft. I found this to be even more prevalent in his follow-up, 2023’s Maestro, which saw Cooper starring as renowned composer Leonard Bernstein and delivering a sublimely directed film that made some of the most inspired black-and-white visual choices I’ve seen this decade.

Now, Cooper has returned with his third directorial effort, Is This Thing On?, a distinctly different kind of film. While A Star Is Born blended stylized flourishes with a more cinéma vérité approach to its interpersonal sequences, Maestro played like a pristine, meticulously measured cinematic work. Fascinatingly, if Maestro was Cooper going all in on stylization, then Is This Thing On? plays as its polar opposite, as the director goes all in on naturalism and the experiential. So much so that not only is the film shot almost entirely with a handheld camera (something only sparingly done in his prior films), but Cooper himself is even operating the camera.

The result is a very different kind of Bradley Cooper film: a dramedy starring Will Arnett and Laura Dern, based on a semi-autobiographical script by Arnett, Cooper, and co-writer Mark Chappell. The film opens with a married couple (Forte and Dern) separating, and finds the husband discovering unexpected solace in performing stand-up comedy at a local New York City club for the first time. Things blossom from there, but it’s safe to say Is This Thing On? manages to feel both a welcome diversification for Cooper as a director and a work that retains his greatest strengths in strikingly palpable ways.

TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT “IS THIS THING ON?”

5. Bradley Cooper’s Performance

There’s been chatter online for the last several years about Cooper, both as a performer and a filmmaker, and he’s become something of an internet punching bag in the process. Many have routinely accused him of being hungry for Academy Award recognition, with Maestro specifically falling into the crosshairs of this discourse back in 2023. However, I think reducing Cooper’s choices to such a general characterization is lazy at best and reductive at worst.

I don’t know how you can watch a performance like Cooper’s in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley and think he delivered that utterly unhinged, gonzo performance solely for the sake of some imaginary Oscar. Similarly, it seems pretty evident to me that both A Star Is Born and Maestro were much more than meager awards bait; they were vivacious passion projects with merits far beyond that. I digress, but I say all of this to say it’s easy to get caught up in conversations like these and forget a simple truth: Bradley Cooper is really fucking funny.

That’s what makes his performance in Is This Thing On? such a breath of fresh air. As a well-meaning but befuddled character literally named Balls, Cooper is a comedic highlight of the film. This also works extremely well for the occasionally quite heavy film, as Cooper the actor literally interjects to bring levity to Cooper the director’s film in genuinely joyous ways.

4. The Achingly Vulnerable Script

I mentioned that the script is semi-biographical, and I think that’s a fair characterization. Outside of the film’s closing title card of “inspired by a true story,” Arnett went through a divorce of his own a few years back, and it’s clear that the writer-star is bringing a good bit of his personal experience to the table here. After co-writing the script with Chappell, Cooper came aboard the film and did a rewrite of his own, adding even more layers to the whole thing, considering that Cooper had also recently gone through a divorce at the time.

The result is a script that finds universality in specificity. The entire story feels achingly relatable and full of empathy, sidestepping many of the old clichés of marriage- or divorce-centric stories to instead dig into the real heart of the matter beneath it all in frequently revelatory fashion.

3. Will Arnett and Laura Dern

The two lead performances pair excellently with the script. There’s a real sense of immediacy and intimacy to Arnett and Dern’s work, both in isolation and in terms of their chemistry together. You fully believe that these two people love each other and have driven each other insane over the years with their own distinct idiosyncrasies. If either of these performances had been even a bit off, the film as a whole would have fallen flat. Instead, they miraculously elevate the already stellar material even further.

2. Bradley Cooper’s Direction

There are so many little moments throughout this film that fortify my belief that Bradley Cooper is an ambitious, audacious, and supremely talented visual storyteller. Laura Dern’s subway train flying by Arnett’s face in close-up, cutting to a wide shot filled with empty space just as it fully disappears, and then using that empty space for the title drop? Wonderful. The intercutting of the highlight sequence in the middle of the film, where Dern’s character and her date (played by motherfucking Peyton Manning, of all people) are unknowingly attending the same comedy club where Arnett’s character is about to perform? So effectively suspenseful and cringe-inducing. The moment where an especially tense confrontation between Arnett and Dern is literally captured in the same shot as Arnett’s character storming off and going onstage at a different location, creating the visual effect of his rage shooting him onto that stage with vicious force? Genuinely incredible.

On top of all of this, Cooper’s go-to cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, makes a meal out of every morsel of a shot. There’s so much great work here that is absolutely worthy of study and analysis; Cooper cements himself as a grade-A filmmaker.

1. That Final Cut

And of course, I had to save the greatest testament to Cooper’s filmmaking abilities for last. I won’t give it away, but I found the final cut of this movie to be an audiovisual masterstroke. Cooper has long had a gift for making incisive, highly affecting associative editing choices in his work, and here, alongside editor Charlie Greene, he saves the best and boldest for last. It had me literally sitting there with my jaw dropped as the credits rolled. A transcendent moment that makes a single cut feel like the culmination of the entire two-hour journey. Immaculate filmmaking.

RGM GRADE

(A-)

Is This Thing On? is terrific. It feels authentic, raw, and incredibly well-crafted. It is yet another empathetic and powerful work from Cooper, and makes me look all the more forward to seeing what this filmmaker does next.