Julianne Moore effectively gives three different performances in Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, though it’s all the same character, the same story, the same journey. We didn’t need more reminders of the actress’s range — she’s one of the best we’ve got — but it’s good to remember how … what’s the word … explosive she can be. Eisenberg’s playful comedy, which just premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, is sometimes a musical and occasionally a thriller. A description of its modest premise can’t really do it justice: A suburban New Jersey homemaker gets a big part in a small local-theater production despite her inexperience and butts heads with her assertive director. As it starts, we might suspect we’ve seen this type of story before. But The Debut grows to become something altogether wilder, a fire-breathing encomium to the reality-altering power of acting.
Moore’s Mona Friedman is indeed a familiar figure, a shy and impressionable wife who quietly nods along at dinner, lets people cut in front of her at the store, and seems generally uninterested in sticking up for herself. But we sense untapped reserves of ambition: After her lousy audition for the role of Miss Danielle, a hard-ass building super in a local musical-theater production of something called Nosey Neighbors, Mona goes around town discarding the tear-away tabs on all the show’s flyers, to make sure nobody else tries out for the part. When she does get the gig, however, Mona is suddenly confronted with the fact that her intimidating director, Jerry Blankenbuehler (Paul Giamatti), thinks she stinks. Her castmates, supportive to a fault, tell her this is just part of the process: “That’s what Jerry does,” they inform her. “He’s going to drag you through the shit and the mud, and you have to be ready for the shit and the mud.”
Jerry could easily be a caricature of a pretentious artiste stuck overseeing anonymous regional theater productions. (At first, he reminded me of Jon Lovitz’s Llewelyn Sinclair, the bloviating theater director in the classic Simpsons episode “A Streetcar Named Marge.”) But Giamatti and Eisenberg find something noble in him, too. Jerry does in fact drag Mona through the shit and the mud: In the film’s most unforgettable scene, he breaks down her psychological barriers and makes her improvise a monologue that goes to absurd, hilarious places. He also takes her to a random apartment building and makes her go inside and pretend to be the super. The process of building a character requires some degree of ego death, and as the old Mona disappears and a new Mona emerges, Moore’s own performance reaches transcendent levels of hilarity. This looks like the most fun she’s had in years.
With each wild transformation in Mona’s character, the film changes stylistically. As rehearsals move forward, Eisenberg repeats key scenes in the play and shoots them differently each time, his camera coming to represent Mona’s shifting perspective. That’s not all that changes. The Debut’s relationship to reality also gets slippier, as surreal and noirish elements intrude on the narrative, leading to a kind of sweet delirium where we’re not quite sure what we’re watching. It’s as if the film is breaking down and rebuilding itself along with Mona.
The Debut is a deceptively strange movie. It has a real sense of play, which is reflected in the actual (fake) play itself. Eisenberg himself apparently wrote the lyrics to the songs in Nosey Neighbors, and he’s got a great ear for that middle ground between the parodic and the pretend-profound. The songs feel like something we must surely have heard before, maybe in some distant high-school production in some other life. But nope — they’re apparently original. “This city may have chewed me up / But it hasn’t spit me out” goes the refrain in Miss Danielle’s signature song, a pastiche of big-city dreaming that’s moving in part because it’s so tacky. One of Mona’s castmates reminds her that they’re all outsiders and outcasts, a fact that Jerry himself, despite supposedly being “the biggest name in New Jersey county theater,” also clearly recognizes. Nobody here is bound for Broadway, but they’re all beautiful anyway in their creative ambition.
This is an exciting step forward for Eisenberg the director, who had a breakthrough a couple of years ago with the lovely A Real Pain, which earned co-star Kieran Culkin an Academy Award. The Debut perhaps bears more similarities to the director’s uneven (though also underrated) first feature, When You Finish Saving the World (2022), which also starred Moore. All three films, however, deal with the question of how to exist around other people. They are populated by characters who swing between extremes, people on the verge of disappearing one minute and of being too forward the next, either revealing too much or too little. That feels very much in tune with the anxious characters Eisenberg has played over the course of his acting career, but this whole directing thing is working out nicely for him, too. And in this new collaboration with Moore, he’s found the perfect actress to embody our search for an elusive equilibrium.
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