Is this thing on? : a vibrant rom’com’ (review)

The brilliant Will Arnett and Laura Dern shine in front of Bradley Cooper’s camera who continues his exploration of the world of entertainment and its expiatory power. Another success!

Casually, Bradley Cooper is charting a path as a filmmaker. “It’s nothing”, because the preconceptions being what they are, it was difficult to imagine that the handsome actor revealed by Very Bad Trip can become such an assertive author, guided by the same obsession: the illusion that the lights of the stage reflect to others and to oneself.

Cooper-filmmaker never ceases to explore these territories of permanent staging where the psyche finds itself overexposed and therefore weakened. Her A Star is Born (2018) had the colors of an overly sweet marshmallow but the taste of a beautiful melodrama about the magical and evil powers of show business. Then came Maestro (2023) where the exercise of the biopic pushed this exploration of the life of a tormented artist a little further.

Cooper, again in front and behind the camera, had experienced a bashing for cultural appropriation. In question a false nose to imitate the Jew Leonard Bernstein. His face thus modified produced a strangeness attenuated by the splendor of black and white. We could see a metaphor for the subject, the “mask” reflecting the misleading reflection of a split hero.

This Is This Thing On? begins with an almost similar disorder. The camera lingers on a school performance before narrowing its focus on a dad who is visibly out of style. But Will Arnett who plays him looks a bit like Cooper himself, to the point of wondering what’s wrong physically. The effect lasts only an instant, definitively swept away by the appearance of the filmmaker-actor in the shoes of a small-time actor slumped in bourgeois comfort.

Here we follow Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess (Laura Dern), a couple in the middle of a breakup. One soulful evening carried by the energy of despair, Alex enters a stand-up club and launches into a short improv about his new status as a bachelor, microphone in hand. If the performance is hesitant, the presence is undeniable and the audience is compassionate. A catharsis is underway. Alex will become a regular here, adopted by the small crowd of microphone pros.

In addition to wit and wit, incarnation through speech requires a sense of rhythm and timing. There could therefore be a gap between the world of the stage where Alex would feel more and more at ease to atone for his resentments or even his faults and “real” life where the dialogue would be broken. The interest is on the contrary to show the continuum between the stage and the backstage (this is where the story distances itself from the reference series, The Fabulous Mrs. Maisel ).

Here, the word constantly circulates, reinvents itself but never exhausts itself. This uninterrupted flow imposes a dynamic restored by a staging always at a good distance from beings and things. The separation of a couple requires a renewal of spaces – those we leave, those we invest – and permanent exchanges: children to pass on, dogs to lug around, friends to satisfy.

However, Alex and Tess, caught in the tangle of their intimate lives, constantly brought back to what is supposed to connect them, take advantage of this chaos to re-enchant what can be. A wonderful sequence shows Tess attending Alex’s show by chance. Through clever editing, the thing is filmed as an intimate dialogue between them. Dialogue that both will soon replay on the sidewalk. Limelight and reality intertwined. Word as a stitch.

By Bradley Cooper. With Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Bradley Cooper… Duration: 2h04. Released February 25, 2026