New York 2025 Review: IS THIS THING ON?, Bradley Cooper Adapts an Old Joke About the Lengths Men Can Go to Avoid Therapy

Is This Thing On?, which just had its world premiere as the closing film of the 2025 New York Film Festival, is a third directorial feature work of Bradley Cooper.

As it follows A Star is Born (2018) and Maestro (2023), the most fascinating aspect of the new film is how it manages to be so seemingly different from these two – and yet so similar at the very core of it. This time around, though, Cooper doesn’t play the male lead himself, making way for his longtime friend, Will Arnett.

But despite Cooper claiming that “it would be a mess” if he played this character, it mostly seems like a bout of artistic modesty. For all of the film's obvious charm, nothing is really grounded or earned here, and pretty much everything is interchangeable: even New York, which is supposed to be a major character of its own. Even the amazing Laura Dern, who gives a stellar performance as usual, could be easily substituted, as blasphemous as it may sound.

Arnett plays Alex Novak, a middle-aged finance guy, who is recently separated from his wife of 20 years, Tess (Dern). Instigated by loneliness and half of an edible, he finds himself doing a short standup during an open mic night at the Comedy Cellar club. Despite the initial awkwardness, Alex enjoys the experience and comes back for more, gradually getting more and more confident both in his routines, during which he mostly recounts the events of his past and present, and in his new life.

Is This Thing On? has obvious signs of being a crowd-pleaser that chooses to pretend that it isn’t a rather conventional dramedy about a man in the throes of a midlife crisis and a couple who are obviously up for a stab at a second chance. In reality, the story, co-written by Cooper, Arnett, and Mark Chappell, as well as Cooper’s already trademark broad-strokes directorial style, feature most of the recognizable clues pointing to this very thing. 

Apart from the central duo, there is a set of familiar supporting characters – all demonstrating a varying degree of eccentricity, including the couple’s two young kids and Alex’s parents (Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds). There are also obligatory best friends, married to each other. They are played by Andra Day and Cooper himself, who gets a concise but truly meaty role of a delusional actor, who conveniently disappears for most of the story, only to burst on screen with an improbably insightful piece of wisdom when necessary.

This is also a familiar genre story in the sense that Is This Thing On? likes throwing around seemingly charged questions about long-time relationships, love versus habit, and the complexity of life in general, but doesn’t really answer any of them. Instead, the film is drowning in comforting platitudes that were popular during the romcom renaissance in the aughts. What’s even more frustrating: none of those things, including the boisterous happy ending, are earned here.

As the story is almost exclusively told from Alex’s perspective (with only a few scenes giving us insight into Tess’s side of things, which is a separate major issue altogether), we don’t really get any kind of emotional trajectory here. Apart from indulging in a comforting and uplifting hobby, which serves as pseudo-therapy, there isn’t any inward work done on his part.

Even more damningly, there are never any consequences to anything he does or says. Even his final declaration about the difference between being unhappy with a marriage and being unhappy in it is nothing more than a weird rhetorical point that doesn’t bear much meaning and resolves nothing. 

Is This Thing On? does offer a few interesting choices from the acting and technical standpoints. Throughout the majority of the film, Cooper chooses to literally focus on the central characters, which translates into multiple intimate close-ups that both Arnett and Dern handle with perfect grace.

Arnett, an actor with grand comedic sensibilities, has an additionally challenging task of playing a man who is only funny in an unintentional way. You can tell that all of that undoubtedly presented a great experience for all the participants. Which only serves to confirm an important memo about standup routines: when a person on stage enjoys their performance a bit too much, it doesn't necessarily guarantee that the people off stage are enjoying it to the same extent.