Bradley Cooper returns with Is This Thing On?, a grown‑up drama about midlife, love and the power of connection

Bradley Cooper returns behind the camera with Is This Thing On?, a measured, adult drama that centers on the unraveling and tentative repair of a long marriage. The film follows Alex (Will Arnett), a finance professional who is splitting from his wife Tess (Laura Dern) after more than two decades together. They share two 10-year-old sons—not twins but Irish ones, as Alex will later joke—an idiosyncratic detail that signals a life that has grown comfortable, and then brittle. The setting—a sprawling suburban home outside New York City—frames a story about the slow drift between two people who once believed they could grow old together. Cooper keeps the stakes intimate: a question of what remains when the couple stops pretending everything is fine and starts naming what has gone missing.

When the separation seems final, Alex wanders into a small bar on the edge of the city, hoping only to drink away the night. The bouncer demands a $15 cover for the evening’s open-mic, and Alex, with a stubborn half-smile, signs up instead of paying. His off-the-cuff set is not a polished routine but a mordant, heartfelt riff about a life he thought would be different. The room laughs and then listens, and for the first time in years, he feels seen. He keeps returning, drawn to a community that treats the ordinary as something worth marking, worth sharing, and worth laughing about. The club becomes a fragile lifeline, a place where two people can test the possibility of a new connection while acknowledging the residue of what was.

The film builds a quiet world around that barroom space. The open‑mic night is populated by a revolving cast of performers who form a sort of makeshift family: Amy Sedaris, Chloe Radcliffe, and Jordan Jensen bring warmth, jittery energy, and lived-in banter to the club’s rooms. Ian Arnett has written the characters to feel tactile and real, and Cooper himself appears in a supporting role as Balls, Alex’s closest friend who is alternately self-absorbed and endearingly wayward. Balls is a working actor who chases the next gig while trying to maintain a sense of humor about the chaos it creates at home with his wife Christine, played by Andra Day. Their exchanges illuminate another couple’s friction—sharp, affectionate, and sometimes merciless—providing a mirror for Tess and Alex as they test their own bond.

Arnett and Dern deliver performances with quiet, prickly grace. Their chemistry is textured, built on long looks, small gestures, and the unspoken history that still threads through their conversations. Alex has spent years trying to do everything right, but the script gradually reveals how those attempts can mask fear, regret, and the stubborn hope that the spark that once warmed a marriage can be rekindled. Tess’s evolution is equally nuanced. She’s not simply the long-suffering partner but a person who has also changed, who can no longer inhabit the same version of herself she once was. The result is a portrait of midlife that is less about melodrama and more about the delicate recalibration of identity within a shared life.

Cooper’s approach to direction and script is unmistakably personal. The screenplay—co-written by Cooper, Arnett, and Mark Chappell, inspired by the life of English comedian John Bishop—leans into the everyday, the imperfect, and the thoughtful moments that accumulate into meaning. The film’s texture—its pacing, its quiet humor, its insistence on small epiphanies rather than loud revelations—harks back to a late-1990s and early-2000s sensibility in which grown-up stories could still feel cinematic and emotionally direct. It is not a blockbuster in the traditional sense, but it aims to restore a space for adult cinema that treats relational nuance as a worthy subject and a shared experience for audiences in the theater.

The performances and restraint are complemented by Searchlight Pictures’ understated production, which favors natural light, intimate interiors, and a soundscape that lets conversations breathe. The film’s tone avoids cynicism even as it acknowledges life’s disappointments; it doesn’t prescribe a single path to reconciliation, but rather offers the possibility that two people can reconnect by acknowledging what remains true about them—the life they built, the children they share, the flaws and strengths they’ve carried for years—and choosing to move forward together with a more honest sense of who they are now. In a year when midlife stories have often felt sidelined, Is This Thing On? presents a quiet, almost noble case for why grown-up cinema still matters.

Time’s review of the film characterizes it as the kind of movie Hollywood has forgotten how to make—an intimate, character-driven drama that trusts audiences to meet the film halfway. The piece notes Cooper’s ongoing commitment to works that foreground adult concerns, relationships, and the slow work of personal growth over spectacle. While the movie may not rush toward a dramatic, crowd-pleasing arc, its insistence on truth and human connection offers something steady for viewers who long for cinema that feels earned and real. Is This Thing On? ultimately invites audiences to ponder what it means to grow up not once but again, with someone, and to discover that love can endure not because it is flawless but because it is chosen, day after day.

Is This Thing On? is a portrait of adults negotiating life’s second chances with patience, humor, and a shared longing for meaning that isn’t purely about outcome but about the way a relationship helps people stay connected to who they are.

From the opening tableaux of Alex and Tess’s quiet, exhausted marriage to the late scenes in which two people decide whether to redraw their life together, the film treats love as a work in progress rather than a finalized state. It’s a stance that feels especially timely in a cultural landscape where the economics of entertainment often reward breadth over depth. Cooper’s film argues that there remains a place for the slow, intimate, adult story—one that asks not what a character can achieve in a single act but what two people can accomplish by choosing to stay in the same room and try again.

The movie’s focus on midlife estrangement, the quiet power of community, and the possibility of repair offers a distinct, contemplative counterpoint to more sensationalized stories about romance and aging. It’s not a film that shouts, but it speaks with a steady, empathetic voice about the reality that life—long, complicated, and imperfect—continues to offer chances to reconnect with the people we love.

If Is This Thing On? can be seen as a time capsule of late-2020s adult storytelling, it’s also a reminder that the best cinema about growing up can be quietly radical: it centers two people who are not at the end of their story but at a new hinge point, asking themselves what it means to love, risk, and grow up again in the ordinary space where life actually happens.