VIFF 2025 | Will Arnett and Bradley Cooper Joke, 'Is This Thing On?'

"I can't control when a character leaves me."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—Actor/director Bradley Cooper and comedian Will Arnett (longtime real-life friends and once roommates) team up for possibly the most divorced guy energy movie ever made. In his third directorial outing, Is This Thing On? takes a turn from professional music to amateur open mic stand-up comedy in his hilarious dramedy about the artistry of telling jokes to strangers on stage in a dark room late at night.

A graceful Laura Dern co-stars as Arnett's soon-to-be ex-wife, a former Olympian volleyball athlete, dissatisfied with the general unhappiness of her husband. After an amicable separation and juggling their two ten-year-old sons (Irish twins), he drunkenly stumbles into performing jokes about his impending divorce on stage at Manhattan's Comedy Cellar to great results—inspired by something that evidently happened to English comic John Bishop, who shares a co-story credit with Cooper and Arnett, with a screenplay by them alongside Mark Chappell.

Set against Arnett and Dern as the unhappy couple are the comically mismatched married pairing of Cooper and Andra Day, both blisteringly chaotic yet hilarious. Framed by cinematographer Matty Libatique, who also cameos as an angry stand-up, in close-ups through handheld camera work, Cooper's film enhances its intimacy to make the marital crisis lows and stage performance laugh highs all the more manic. Arnett's vulnerably raw performance allows for some of the more self-indulgent detours to be manageable.

Cooper and Arnett have made a self-referentially earnest divorce drama using stand-up comedy as a therapeutic framing device for expressing the mutual emotional frustrations of a long-lasting marriage and co-parenting. It's a sensational portrait of a male midlife crisis. One last thing, it's almost impossible not to wonder what in the film is partially based on Arnett's real-life marriage and friendly divorce from fellow famous comedian Amy Poehler, whom he also shares two young sons with.

Is This Thing On? screened at the 2025 Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations series at the Vancouver Playhouse.


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