(Above: Laura Dern and Will Arnett in Is This Thing On? (2025). Photo by Jason McDonald/Searchlight Pictures – © 2025 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved).

By M. Faust

Roaming the streets of Manhattan, distraught at the end of his marriage, a man wanders into a bar that is having an open mic comedy night. He finds himself onstage, and with nothing to say, starts talking about his marital problems. He gets some laughs – does anyone not get a little high from that? – but he also gets something else he hasn’t felt in a while, a feeling he has found something he wants to continue doing. 

You would be forgiven for thinking that this is a gender-reversed summary of the TV series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”: stand-up as therapy. In fact, it is what happened 25 years ago to a fellow from Liverpool named John Bishop, who went on to become a successful British comedian. He told this story to the American comic actor Will Arnett, who thought, “wow, this would make a great movie!”

And he was right. Arnett wrote a script in collaboration with his friends Mark Chappell and Bradley Cooper, who signed on to direct it. And the result is one of my favorite movies of the past year.  

Is This Thing On? is not really a movie about stand-up comedy, which in the past has made for some awfully grim films. (Remember Punchline, with Tom Hanks and Sally Field? Or Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy?) It’s actually about marriage, middle age and mistakes, and what it takes to get on the right path again. 

Mostly it is a movie about characters, about people you can relate to and root for. As the story opens, Arnett’s Alex Novak and his wife Tess (Laura Dern) are at the beginning of what appears to be an amiable divorce after 25 years together. They bear each other no overt animosity, and agree that they need to do what is best for their two sons. The marriage has simply run out of steam. Alex is in a rut professionally, while Tess comes to realize how much she regrets giving up a career as a professional athlete to become a wife and mother. 

At the risk of giving away too much, what we have here is what author Stanley Cavell once called the “comedy of remarriage.” He was referring to screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s, movies like The Awful Truth, The Palm Beach Story and His Girl Friday, in which various madcap adventures give separated couples a chance to rediscover what it was that drew them together in the first place. Is This Thing On? lacks the high hilarity of those classics, offering instead a gently persuasive look at people learning how to grow together instead of apart. 

Director Cooper displays a remarkable affinity with an ensemble cast (including himself, Andra Day, Ciarán Hinds, Christine Ebersole, Peyton Manning, Sean Hayes, Amy Sedaris and various Manhattan stand-ups). He and cinematographer Matthew Libatique, who shot most of Darren Aronofsky’s features, keep the focus intimate without being obtrusive, with a particularly sure (and rare) grip on the proper use of close-ups. 

It’s no surprise that Dern is excellent, but the real surprise is Arnett, who to the best of my knowledge has never done a straight dramatic role in a career spanning 30 years of comedies. When I saw this film in November I assumed he would be a lock at least for nominations in the various year-end awards. The fact that he hasn’t been recognized thus far is sad but I guess not a surprise given the overwhelming critical popularity of in-your-face endurance tests like Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another. If you go to the movies looking to have your sensibilities hammered into oblivion, this is not the film for you. The rest of you could do worse than to check it out.