Hold Me Too Close

Writer-director Bradley Cooper’s ‘evangelizing’ new film ‘Is This Thing On?’ explores human connection in marriage and stand-up comedy.

By Frank FalisiFebruary 2, 2026

• Film

UGLY AS IT may seem sometimes—picture a million Netflix specials, all near-identical in their chintzy high-contrast and button-smash editing—stand-up comedy has a novel, occasionally moving cinematography all its own. While the filming of joke-telling can feel emblematic of what we mean when we say “content,” stand-up nevertheless represents a historically compelling challenge for the curious filmmaker. The good bits have already been battle-tested, refined by their writer-speaker, tweaked by inches or sliced entirely; the performer is, paradoxically, also the editor, leaving the director with little to direct. It’s no wonder that a sterling example of the form—Jeff Margolis’s Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979)—mostly moves with long-take patience, letting the writing collide with time in front of the camera eye. Live in Concert becomes an experiment in time and space, which is to say, it becomes cinema, chiefly because it dares the spectator to sit with Pryor’s bomb-monologues, to witness their adulterating pleasure and power unadulterated.

But one needn’t linger exclusively in the past to celebrate the cinematic stand-up special: Bo Burnham’s caring treatment of Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel (2022) is evident precisely in how he moves in and away from the subject, Carmichael—which is distance itself. The distance Rothaniel traverses leads to its central disclosure—Carmichael publicly leaving the closet, live, onstage, mid-set—but the comedian obfuscates his own truth-telling. Using jokes as curlicues, he cloaks an earnest confession in layers of self-protective irony. Throughout, Burnham pushes in slowly, letting his camera tractor-beam into Carmichael’s rhythms before quickly cutting into close-up (Burnham edited as well as directed the special), Carmichael’s face suddenly ambushed, huge. In this manner, tender and insistent, the film’s grammar mirrors the subject’s own real-time morphing relationship to the revelation of truth and the performance that moves us toward it.

Like most subjects and genres of the moving image, the art of filming stand-up need only experiment with intention and emotion to yield beautiful, turbulent objects; there are as many backwater stand-up specials as there are uncreative sports movies as there are cookie-cutter baking shows. What matters—and stop me if you’ve heard this one—is what the actors do. The filmed stand-up special doubles down on the form as fundamentally a shared act. It reveals how the comic shares a room with the spectator who couldn’t be present. It’s an echo.

There is always a scene partner in the audience, watching the footage, saying “I see you” in giggles. Of the early comedy partnership between Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Carrie Courogen, In Miss May Does Not Exist (2024), writes about how staged scenes work on us: “They floated a theory that there were only three types of scenes: a negotiation, a fight, or a seduction.” May and Nichols aren’t entirely free radicals in making this suggestion: Shakespeare—who wrote monologues and speeches of the highest poetry—basically hinges on the two-person scene, the collision and ensuing frisson of two parties challenging one other through language. And American descendants like Tennessee Williams and August Wilson turned these verbal pas de deux into berserker flights, vernaculars smushing up against each other in a desire to show desire—and all its fallouts—in every possible theatrical dimension.

Like any good improviser, Bradley Cooper not only says yes to this theoretical dictum but also doubles down on it in his shaggy and searching third feature, Is This Thing On? (2025). Even as it places itself in the world of contemporary New York stand-up comedy, the film is not a stand-up special. And if it toys with the conventions and milieu of the form, it does so to dare viewers to see all the off-screen actors who make an open mic five work or not. It is, in equal parts, a negotiation, a fight, and a seduction.

But, foremost, Is This Thing On? is a dramatic film, a collection of mostly two-person scenes about negotiating, fighting, or seduction inside and outside of a relationship. It parlays the solitary art of stand-up in much the same way Cooper’s previous films, A Star Is Born (2018) and Maestro (2023), traded on the singular composer: to spin a story about two people and their movement to and from each other. Its colliding parties are Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess Novak (Laura Dern), two fiftysomethings with two young sons, two picturesque dogs, and a marriage that both seem willing to admit has outlasted its lifespan. At least this is the chipper and not quite chilly but brusque tone set in the opening scenes: Tess and Alex amiably agree to call it off while brushing their teeth, saddling up for one last outing as a couple. At the end of their Company-lite night, drinking and bickering with other wearied fiftysomethings, Tess boards a Metro-North train up to their suburban home while Alex returns to his spartan East Village apartment. You can’t do stand-up comedy together, really—otherwise, it’s a scene—so it’s here that Alex, a few dollars short for the cover, impulsively puts his name on an open mic night list. Therein hangs the movie, a sad guy finding a hobby, as a sad woman finds a volleyball coaching position and a date with a Peyton Manning look-alike (Laird, played by actual Peyton Manning).

The thing is, any attempts at critical flippancy or irony—mine included—don’t seem to work on Bradley Cooper, who has spent the better part of just under a decade carving out a space to leverage stories about art as the cure-all to what he has observed to be the crisis of our age: a deficiency of love. Only an actor could think in this manner, and we are frankly better off for the ways in which Cooper’s actorly instincts manifest in his cinema.

His interest in art as an act of composing (songs, musicals, jokes) betrays an interest in the relationship one body has to another body, whether the latter be a medium or a lover. A Star Is Born found its firmament-ready moment in literal duet, leaving in its wake a million-and-then-some karaoke performances of “Shallow”; who better than first-time director Cooper to remind us that “amateur” claims as its root the Latin “amator,” which is to say, “lover”? Maestro dramatized the real love of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre, fugitive and imperfect as it may have been. Everything that feels eternal in A Star Is Born comes off cannier in Maestro, as if Cooper’s belief in the medium occasionally outpaces his ability to marshal images worthy of such exuberance. Both films feel weightless at times, unblocked and drifty, the result of digital filmmakers unused to thinking about how much film they’re willing to expend to get the shot.

Forward-looking Cooper dispenses with a solution altogether in Is This Thing On?, adopting a roving handheld camera operated mainly by—who else?—Bradley Cooper, who is as much a presence here as Steven Soderbergh is in his domestic drama Presence (2025). If, in his previous films, Cooper has tended towards handsome if rudimentary, camerawork, Is This Thing On? marks the first time his cinematography has embarked on a specific, intentional relationship with its subject. The camera moves like its characters, sometimes appearing to be in free fall only to be caught by an especially loaded pause by Dern or a momentary softening in Arnett’s delivery.

We say “chemistry” to describe the feeling we get when two people feel like they have known each other longer than is possible. Here, Cooper prioritizes the same creation of chemistry as in his earlier films, showing how Tess and Alex have a common language with one another, and, from one pragmatic angle, that might be how they’ve talked themselves into breaking up. Is This Thing On? extends the chemistry to the camera itself, which shares with its subjects a closeness that you can lean on, even during an erstwhile midlife crisis. Shooting Alex’s first foray into stand-up, Cooper and cinematographer Matthew Libatique hover the camera like a planetary body orbiting Alex’s head. It pushes and ducks in, transforming the neon-tinctured dark of the Comedy Cellar into an almost ether, turning Alex into exactly what he is in this moment: part confessant, part performer. He is being truthful, even if it isn’t always funny, even if it sometimes is.

Alex’s woe-is-me egoism feels like righteous elation from this close. There is no orchestra to come to the aid of a stand-up comic, no backing band or harmonizing partner. It’s through the raw performance of some half-written, half-uncovered thing wherein you bomb or float on, you and only you. Three features in, Cooper remains highly visible in his own cinema. And while his supporting turn as Balls (not actually a stretch of a moniker, if you’ve spent any time around struggling NYC actors) is a welcome deflation from the heady Strasberging of Maestro, one can’t help but picture the maestro himself inches from his actors’ faces, shoving the camera around like a prop, breathing the same air, standing in as a silent scene partner.

The specter haunting contemporary popular filmmaking is that of the instant auteur, with filmmakers as stylistically disparate as Cooper, Ari Aster, Celine Song, Rose Glass, and Robert Eggers having had features greenlit not despite their relative lack of experience but because of it. That end-all marketing logline of “a film by” is as much a reference to the director’s shared duty as screenwriter as it is an attempt to reduce a filmmaker (and a film) to a discernible brand. From the corporate side, such efforts see labor merely as vibes and render cinema as a luxury candle, something to be burned off to create a pleasant scent. On a material level, brand management has always been the work of auteur theory, but what good is auteurism in 2026 when all the trades seem to print is how lauded, distinctive filmmakers—Joe Dante, John Sayles, Charles Burnett, Todd Solondz, John Waters, et al.—can’t get the funding to make their movies? Here, in slightly repackaged form, is Hollywood once again selling the singular voice, the transformation of an author’s vision into literary cred. Salvation is not coming from inside the conglomerate.

In praising Cooper’s comedy-drama paeans to connection, I don’t mean to suggest his cinema as the only antidote to the multiplying villainies of hype-forward, streaming-brained moviemaking. But there’s a lot to be said for an authorship centered on showing connection, on rescuing marriage stories from the tyranny of realistic bleakness. In a post-Aftersun world, the ending of Is This Thing On? feels a little crazy-making: Tess and Alex watch their sons perform “Under Pressure” with a Camp Rock ensemble of their school peers. It’s janky and amateurish, with bits of exuberance flecked in. Everyone is listening to one another, however haphazardly. As a metaphor for marriage, this sequence has the audacity to argue that trying is enough to get started, or to start over. Soderbergh again: You could call this film Presence too.

“Earnest” is the word some lob at Cooper’s stories. Myself, I prefer “evangelizing”: here is an actor-director who believes in moviemaking like Bruce Springsteen believes in rock and roll, as a potentially transformative force. Like Springsteen, he has the wrongness of an optimist, but the very persistence of such a belief inoculates the singer and performer (and so us too) against the dull pragmatism of the merely realistic. Stupidly, you might ask: What if it all worked out? With a chance to make it good somehow / Hey what else can we do now? And Cooper isn’t above laying himself next to the voices from our collective cinematic past (author, as he is, of our fourth A Star Is Born).

A throwback to Clint Eastwood and Warren Beatty, Cooper distinguishes himself by deigning to transform his movie star capital into passion projects about passion, until now casting himself as the object of narrative ardor. But I’d hardly have expected this much motion toward George Cukor, a studio-era director of formal distinction who nevertheless traded in a similar musicality and observational distance at once broad and scrutinizing. Is This Thing On? plays like a puffier rendition of Cukor’s It Should Happen to You (1954), or a less stentorian, more bittersweet swing on A Bill of Divorcement (1932), a film that posits that insane behavior—like embarking on a career in stand-up—is grounds for a woman to divorce her husband. And like Cukor’s work with women, typified by Judy Holliday in the former and Katharine Hepburn in the latter (her screen debut, and far from her last with Cukor), Cooper also betrays a keen interest in maintaining an actress’s territory in the Hollywood cultural object.

His instincts as a director diverge, notably, from the fratty, male-dominated comedy work that gave Cooper his early breaks and backing. A Star Is Born is as much a film authored with Lady Gaga, just as Maestro daffily—lovingly—insists that Carey Mulligan’s Montealegre is the title character. It’s a thrill to watch Dern work here, not because she’s been gifted any especially insightful scenes but precisely because she’s not. Most of her narrative motivation ping-pongs wildly, but the actor staples her arc together from inside the inscrutable turns—getting into volleyball coaching, sleeping with Alex again, going on a date with Laird—rather than in opposition to them. It is, honestly, what a life looks like. Of working with Cooper, Dern recently confessed, “He’s staring at me through the lens, and I’m looking at him, and we’re waiting through this moment, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, it’s you and me and we’re doing this.’”

Is This Thing On? isn’t not a film about a man finding himself through stand-up comedy (a nightmare situation, perhaps), but as Alex turns into a regular on NYC’s open mic circuit, Is This Thing On? unwinds in ways that feel simultaneously simplistic and inspired. Cooper and his collaborators light on well-observed moments, especially when Tess and Alex split an edible poached from their friends’ bougie party and board their Metro-North together out of muscle memory, before realizing in a fit of bitter giggles that they are each going home alone. There’s a certain Zen to putting characters through a sequence of crucibles and would-be transformations only for their grand realization to be “better unhappy together than unhappy apart.” If it works—and, for me, it does—it is because we see how these actors move with one another, how they have cannily and consistently been directed into chemistry, rather than pushed into histrionics or pat dramatics.

As one-way and love-addled as it may be, I’ll buy that marriage stories needn’t end in mini-apocalypses rendered with a dour fetish for regal doom. “Is this thing on?” refers as much to Bradley’s handheld camera as it does a microphone or a marriage. It isn’t an insightful ask so much as it is a genuine question, a willingness to connect that at least earns, for its characters, a provisional happy ending.