The third and least persuasive of Bradley Cooper's films about performers and performance (after 2018's A Star is Born and 2023's Maestro), Is This Thing On? also serves, as you may be aware, as an origin story for the comedian John Bishop. This instantly poses a minor problem for British viewers, who may start to hear whatever jokes there are in this tale of an accidental stand-up both in star Will Arnett's wheedling baritone and Bishop's vibrant Scouse. (They may also recall Bishop once took a highish-profile acting gig himself in Ken Loach's semi-forgotten Route Irish.) The theme Cooper and Arnett (who co-writes, riffing on his friend Bishop's early career) are pursuing is how certain men express themselves. Arnett's protagonist Alex is a middle-aged sadsack - even his fringe seems aimless, set to "floppy masculinity" - who drifts into a New York comedy club upon separating from wife Tess (Laura Dern); he takes his first steps along the tightrope of open-mic comedy principally to avoid paying a steep cover charge. Earning the nickname "sad guy" from his peers on account of his heart-on-sleeve material, he fumbles his way towards something like proficiency, and eventually comes to have the conversations he should have had with his wife over the 25 years of their relationship, earning himself a second chance at love. If that sounds a little route-one even for a multiplex-bound romcom, well, it is: the tryhard Cooper of Maestro is here replaced by Cooper the people-pleaser, giving the audience the happy ending they might seek of a Friday or Saturday night. Is This Thing On? is ultimately to John Bishop what 2013's One Chance was to the Britain's Got Talent winner Paul Potts; this being Hollywood, however, Bishop gets his mate Will Arnett to play him, where Potts had to settle for James Bloody Corden.
It's on all right, in that Cooper is alert to passing comedy-club detail, and to how two grown-ups with a child to raise might fill their days and nights in the wake of a separation. But is it funny? Not as funny as Judd Apatow's underrated Funny People, for one, a film that approached the same milieu (and much the same male midlife crisis) with plentiful gags scribbled over its sweaty palms. Alex's routines are forever more heartfelt than fully hilarious, and Cooper has to resort to blundering on himself to try and up the laugh rate, playing a klutzy actor apparently going by the name Balls. His film subscribes to the same therapised idea of stand-up that resulted in Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, a comedy special that was funny only up to a point; though several real-life stand-ups appear alongside Alex, the film isn't especially interested in the comedy club as a place where jokes are told, rather as a community where people can find one another, maybe even themselves. This script makes that tricky process seem very easy, though; the appreciable complications of A Star Is Born and Maestro are notable by their absence here. Maybe Bishop's other half really did walk by chance into a club where the comic was pouring out his heart; in a movie, however, it comes over as purest Hollywood hokum. (Cooper might have got away with this once, but he later pulls the same trick with Alex's dad Ciaran Hinds: it's amazing how many people with no stated interest in comedy just happen to drop by this club and pay this cover charge at the exact moment Alex is onstage making amends.) Likewise, when Alex and Tess's twenty-five years of (minor) relationship grievances finally get addressed, it's in one neat and tidy conversation, the movie's own tight five. (At least Marriage Story had someone punch through a wall.) When Is This Thing On? isn't being blandly placid - two nice folks shruggingly call it a day, shruggingly try other things, then shruggingly reunite - it can seem pretty flimsy and trifling: a sweet little anecdote that hasn't quite been scaled up to become a satisfying movie. In 2026, no-one would expect a studio movie to align with the Louis CK view of comedy-cellar and divorced-dad life, but Arnett is more Lennie Bennett than Lenny Bruce; faced with this silly-haired sap, working through his woes without providing any substantial laughs in return, it's a miracle this New York crowd don't boo or bottle him off. Even they're too nice.
Is This Thing On? is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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