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Julianne Moore effectively gives three different performances in Jesse Eisenberg\u2019s The Debut, though it\u2019s all the same character, the same story, the same journey. We didn\u2019t need more reminders of the actress\u2019s range \u2014 she\u2019s one of the best we\u2019ve got \u2014 but it\u2019s good to remember how \u2026 what\u2019s the word \u2026 explosive she can be. Eisenberg\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
Moore\u2019s 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\u2019s 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: \u201cThat\u2019s what Jerry does,\u201d they inform her. \u201cHe\u2019s going to drag you through the shit and the mud, and you have to be ready for the shit and the mud.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jerry could easily be a caricature of a pretentious artiste stuck overseeing anonymous regional theater productions. (At first, he reminded me of Jon Lovitz\u2019s Llewelyn Sinclair, the bloviating theater director in the classic Simpsons episode \u201cA Streetcar Named Marge.\u201d) 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\u2019s 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\u2019s own performance reaches transcendent levels of hilarity. This looks like the most fun she\u2019s had in years.<\/p>\n
With each wild transformation in Mona\u2019s 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\u2019s shifting perspective. That\u2019s not all that changes. The Debut\u2019s relationship to reality also gets slippier, as surreal and noirish elements intrude on the narrative, leading to a kind of sweet delirium where we\u2019re not quite sure what we\u2019re watching. It\u2019s as if the film is breaking down and rebuilding itself along with Mona.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 \u2014 they\u2019re apparently original. \u201cThis city may have chewed me up \/ But it hasn\u2019t spit me out\u201d goes the refrain in Miss Danielle\u2019s signature song, a pastiche of big-city dreaming that\u2019s moving in part because it\u2019s so tacky. One of Mona\u2019s castmates reminds her that they\u2019re all outsiders and outcasts, a fact that Jerry himself, despite supposedly being \u201cthe biggest name in New Jersey county theater,\u201d also clearly recognizes. Nobody here is bound for Broadway, but they\u2019re all beautiful anyway in their creative ambition.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>, which earned co-star Kieran Culkin<\/a> an Academy Award. The Debut perhaps bears more similarities to the director\u2019s 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\u2019s found the perfect actress to embody our search for an elusive equilibrium.<\/p>\n Sign up for The Critics<\/p>\n A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n