Is This Thing On?

‘I’m getting a divorce. What tipped me off is that I’m living in an apartment on my own and my wife and kids don’t live there.’

With that droll line, delivered in the spotlight of a hushed Manhattan comedy club after half a space cake, Will Arnett’s jaded executive stumbles upon the best – and cheapest – form of therapy available to a broken-up dad struggling amid the ruins of his marriage. Yes, it looks horrifying from a distance, but Alex, it turns out, is built differently.

Based loosely on the experiences of arena-filling UK comic John Bishop, a divorcee-to-be who once walked on stage at a stand-up club to swerve paying the cover charge and never looked back, it shifts the story from Liverpool to Manhattan and the New York ’burbs. Arnett is Bishop surrogate Alex Novak and the Arrested Development actor is a revelation. Opposite is Laura Dern, who has previous in this terrain via a turn as Marriage Story’s hotshot divorce lawyer. She brings her A-game to a very different vision of marital ruin. 

Obviously, divorce sucks at levels that are dizzying – especially when, like Alex and Tess (Dern), there are kids to shelter from the fallout. Props, then, to director and co-writer Bradley Cooper for finding a sense of renewal from this often painful snapshot of marital breakdown, with its forced smiles in front of friends, wrestling over the dogs and the children asking if ‘you’re fighting again’. ‘We need to call this, right?’ Alex asks Tess before moving out of the family home and into a soulless apartment and the out-of-body experience of living a life he doesn’t recognise. For Tess, a similar crisis of identity is alleviated by tentative steps into volleyball coaching, the sport where her excellence had once defined her. 

Will Arnett is a revelation as a broken-up man stumbling upon the best form of therapy

It’s a cursory subplot in a screenplay has its feet firmly in Alex’s shoes. Up-close camerawork ushers you the blurry, buzzy world of New York comedy spots like Greenwich Village’s Comedy Cellar to ride shotgun as Alex channels his angst into laughs from nighttime crowds who connect with his raw honesty. His fellow comics, impressed by his gumption if not his material, also help the take the edge off his desolation.

A fun supporting cast keeps the chill at bay, too. Cooper gives an entertainingly Zach Galifianakis-esque performance as Alex’s self-serious actor pal (‘I can’t chose when the character leaves me!’), with Andra Day (The United States vs. Billie Holiday) as his frustrated partner and Jess’s confidante, while Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds are the supportive parents who kinda-sorta half-prefer Tess. There’s even a surprise role for NFL legend Peyton Manning. 

Rather than a bruising marital wipeout drama, Is This Thing On? is a film about how new purpose and a new tribe can help you re-evaluate what was there all along (the title, of course, refers to the marriage as well as the mic). It might make you think about relationships differently; it probably won’t make you want to take up stand-up.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Jan 30.