The Lovably Fragile Exes of “Is This Thing On?”

The invention, though, comes from real life. Alex’s experience is loosely modelled on that of John Bishop, a British pharmaceutical salesman who, with no standup experience, began performing at open-mike nights at the Frog and Bucket Comedy Club, in Manchester, in 2000. At the time, Bishop was separated from his wife, Melanie, and he later credited his therapeutic forays into comedy, in part, with the salvation of their relationship—and, eventually, with the launch of a performing career. He can now also credit that period, of course, as the inspiration for a Hollywood movie, transplanted from Manchester to Manhattan and featuring no shortage of actual cutups, including Chloe Radcliffe, Jordan Jensen, Dave Attell, and Reggie Conquest. But “Is This Thing On?” isn’t a dishy, insider’s view of the New York comedy scene, and it isn’t trying to be. It knows that its best material lies elsewhere.

Cooper has a thing for marriage stories, specifically those that unfold, at least partly, in the public eye. He began his filmmaking career, in 2018, with a fine remake of “A Star Is Born,” the mother of all Hollywood marital melodramas; in his version, he played a downward-spiralling country-music star opposite Lady Gaga’s ascendant pop diva. He followed up that film with “Maestro” (2023), a dexterously directed bio-pic of Leonard Bernstein (Cooper again, now equipped with a baton and a much derided prosthetic nose) that took pains to lavish equal dramatic attention on Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a stage and screen actor often relegated to the shadow role of Bernstein’s wife. The two pictures could scarcely have been more different, but they circled the same subject with the same bristling intelligence: how the inequities of fame and fortune can upset the already precarious balance of power in a relationship.

With “Is This Thing On?,” Cooper has made a conscious effort to scale down and cheer up. He has also opted to take at least half a step back from the spotlight, casting himself not as the lead but in the cheerful second-banana role of Alex’s best friend, Balls. This name is your second clue that Cooper’s showboating tendencies are not exactly in retreat. The first is the character’s initial entrance: returning one night to his apartment, where Alex, Tess, and a few other friends have gathered, Balls trips, spills an entire carton of oat milk on the rug, and giggles so hard at his own boisterous clumsiness that you have to wonder if it was a premeditated bit. Even so, Cooper, whatever his pratfalls, doesn’t tumble into the trap of derailing his own movie. He doesn’t even steal scenes; he just picks them up for a moment, gives them a rude little squeeze, and then lets them slip back, unbothered, into place.

The film’s cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, is a virtuoso of handheld camerawork, and he shoots with a rough-hewn intimacy that offsets, and sometimes even deepens, the softer, more sitcomy formulations of the script. (Cooper, Arnett, and Mark Chappell wrote the script; the latter two received story credit with Bishop.) Alex has the world’s most lovably supportive parents (Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds), who are delighted to babysit at the drop of a hat or the booking of a last-minute gig. Alex and Tess, determined to keep the peace with their friends, remain almost improbably close to Balls and his wife, Christine (a sharp Andra Day), who appear to be trapped in an unhappy marriage of their own. The Novaks are as congenial as they are comfortably off; not for them the spiteful divorce-court theatrics of Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” (2019), for which Dern won an Oscar for playing a delectably cutthroat family-law attorney. The closest Alex and Tess get to a custody battle is a halfhearted chat about who gets the armoire.

So why, despite the Novaks’ glow of privilege, do we find them more than sufferable, even endearing, in their fragility? You might as well ask why a heavily foreshadowed performance of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure,” with its unsubtle entreaty to “give love that one more chance,” somehow provides just the right note of climactic release. Cooper has a gift for striking conventional beats with knowing understatement, though you do, at times, hear the hiss of an airbrush. During a set one night, Alex delves into the intensely psychological nature of his past fights with Tess; the story builds to a good punch line, but you almost wonder, given how little we see of the couple in full-blown marital-spat mode, if he isn’t exaggerating for comic effect. Much of the third act is set at an Oyster Bay retreat with Christine, Balls, and two married friends (Scott Icenogle and Sean Hayes, who are also husbands offscreen), where Alex and Tess struggle to keep their possibly temporary reunion under wraps. The emotional revelations and the quasi-farcical shenanigans don’t entirely jell, even if the over-all arc, by that point, is clear: with a little self-care—comedy nights for Alex, a volleyball-coaching gig for Tess—an imperfect but loving family might be salvaged.

If that sounds tidily prescriptive, Cooper gives the reality of heartache its due. Rather than slathering angst over every scene, he lets sadness well up when the characters least expect it—as when Tess, visiting Alex’s new apartment, catches sight of two little light-up toothbrushes in his bathroom. Or when one of their sons, after rifling through Dad’s joke folder, quietly sobs at what he’s found. Laughter may be the best medicine, but what if the illness is preferable to the cure? It’s as if Alex, in riffing on life’s most painful raw material, had already packed up his dream of a whole, happy family—and moved on. ♦