It’s rare these days to find comedy and humanity on the same plate — and even more rare to see comedy nuzzling up to mystery. (I don’t mean mystery as in crime-solving; I mean the mystery of existence.) But Jesse Eisenberg’s “The Debut,” a small-town-theater comedy driven by big ideas, is a funny and dizzying mind-bender. It’s like “Waiting for Guffman” made by the Coen brothers at their most rivetingly unhinged. “The Debut” won’t be for everyone, but if you get onto its wavelength (which I did immediately), it sucks you into its “Twilight Zone of Sub-Broadway” vortex, even as the tone remains light and ticklish and surprising.
Eisenberg, as he proved two years ago in the brilliant “A Real Pain,” is a grounded filmmaker (he loves reality). But here he’s working on a high wire of matter-of-fact satire that edges, just barely, into the surreal. Yet it’s still reality-based. At heart, the film is a twisted love letter to the glory of community theater. What holds it together is the suppleness of Eisenberg’s voice as a writer-director (the wit that singes, the story that never stops poking around corners), and the utterly astonishing performance of Julianne Moore, who plays a crumpled wallflower in dire need of blooming. Oh, does she bloom.
Moore’s Mona Friedman is a New Jersey homemaker who has become a Stepford zombie, because no one seems to need her anymore. Her twins, Matty (Joan Diamand) and Maya (Becca Suskauer), are nearly adults, and though they’re still living at home they’ve already checked out. Her husband, Howard (Patrick Fabian), is a handsome stiff-necked jerk who treats Mona like an accessory. And she’s such a fearful, passive people pleaser that none of this is in any danger of changing. Moore, with red eyes and translucent skin, gives off the aura of a damaged doll.
In the opening scene, set in the Brook Theater, she tries out for a small role in the annual local production of “Nosy Neighbors,” and her audition is so weak that we don’t see how she could possibly get the part. She doesn’t. It goes instead to Serena Cherry (Bernadette Peters), a Broadway wannabe who lands any role she wants. (There’s a poster of her in the lobby as the lead in a production of “Evita.”) But then, late one night, Mona gets a call from the musical’s director, Jerry (Paul Giamatti). Serena has bowed out; he’s got no one else to do the part. So Mona is in. (It helps that she ripped off all the phone-number tags on a local flyer for the audition.)
Mona comes into rehearsal the next morning (the cast has been at it for several weeks), and what we instantly see is that “Nosy Neighbors,” an upbeat musical about the residents of a downscale apartment building, is a corny but oddly sturdy piece of third-rate hokum – it’s like “Rent” redone by Corky St. Clair. (The songs, which Eisenberg composed, sound like Jonathan Larson-by-numbers.) Mona is playing Miss Danielle, the building super, a tough nut who wears a tool belt and has the signature line, “Rent’s due!” Not exactly an acting challenge.
The other cast members are warm and welcoming, but Mona, who has no theatrical experience (beyond singing in her church choir until she was 13), is awful beyond words. She delivers that line as if she was whispering it in a library. She’s a doormat in life and a washout of an actress, even for community theater.
So Jerry, realizing that he’s got a potential disaster on his hands, decides that his only recourse is to give Mona a tough-love private acting lesson. In a remarkable scene, he makes her ask for the rent check he’s holding in his hand — and more than that, he keeps asking her why she wants it, breaking down her defenses. It’s like a Sanford Meisner exercise turned torture session, and Mona finally busts through with a monologue that spills out of her guts, about how she wants that rent money because if she doesn’t get it she’ll be in an alley eating plague-ridden rats. She burns through her own lack of purpose and identity and, at that moment, becomes an actress. What Jerry doesn’t realize is that he’s created a monster.
“The Debut” is at once an affectionate homage to the wide-eyed passion of community theater; a deftly original thriller; a parable of self-esteem; a teasing mockery of the mechanisms of self-esteem; and a one-woman psychodrama in which Mona discovers who she is by leaving her old reality behind.
There’s a hilarious scene in which Jerry, as part of Mona’s Method training, takes her out to a random apartment building, and she talks her way into someone’s home by impersonating the super and demanding to fix the toilet. The thing is, the Method training works. Mona lets herself go and becomes a confident actress. Yet if that’s all there was to it, “The Debut” would just be a tidy feel-good fable. Eisenberg is too talented and ambitious to make that kind of movie. He wants instead to make our heads spin by taking us down a rabbit hole.
It’s when Mona, fed up with her husband, moves out of her home and into a fleabag hotel, where the faucets drip and the dingy electric lights are buzzy and there are strange sounds coming through the walls, that the film begins to turn into a slightly dreamy hellscape. But Moore keeps us on her side. Her Mona is avid to find a new way to be, even if that means putting on a janitor suit and, after shorting out the hotel’s electricity (and burning off her eyebrows), getting a new look that makes her resemble Camille Paglia crossed with Joan Jett as styled by David Lynch. The joke, and it’s a juicy one, is that she has now gone full Method, and insists that everything her character in the musical says must be entirely reality-based.
It wouldn’t work if Mona’s fearless new acting ethos weren’t so goddamn funny. And it wouldn’t work if Paul Giamatti, who’s kind of playing the audience’s surrogate, didn’t invest Jerry, the disgruntled theater romantic, with a hope and rage and bone-deep melancholy that keeps the film from flying off into the ether. The actors playing the song-and-dance cast members of “Nosy Neighbors” (they include Eisenberg) perform with sublimely subtle cluelessness. But it’s the audacity of Julianne Moore — now clenched, now grinning, now timid, now acting — that brings “The Debut” to its gratifying conclusion, as Mona, through the theater, discovers an extraordinary new role: herself.
