{"id":615983,"date":"2026-09-06T05:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T05:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/615983\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T05:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T05:32:09","slug":"the-debut-review-jesse-eisenbergs-dizzying-community-theater-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/615983\/","title":{"rendered":"The Debut Review: Jesse Eisenberg’s Dizzying Community-Theater Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt\u2019s rare these days to find comedy and humanity on the same plate \u2014 and even more rare to see comedy nuzzling up to mystery. (I don\u2019t mean mystery as in crime-solving; I mean the mystery of existence.) But Jesse Eisenberg<\/a>\u2019s \u201cThe Debut<\/a>,\u201d a small-town-theater comedy driven by big ideas, is a funny and dizzying mind-bender. It\u2019s like \u201cWaiting for Guffman\u201d made by the Coen brothers at their most rivetingly unhinged. \u201cThe Debut\u201d won\u2019t be for everyone, but if you get onto its wavelength (which I did immediately), it sucks you into its \u201cTwilight Zone of Sub-Broadway\u201d vortex, even as the tone remains light and ticklish and surprising.<\/p>\n

\n\tEisenberg, as he proved two years ago in the brilliant \u201cA Real Pain,\u201d is a grounded filmmaker (he loves reality). But here he\u2019s working on a high wire of matter-of-fact satire that edges, just barely, into the surreal. Yet it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a>, who plays a crumpled wallflower in dire need of blooming. Oh, does she bloom.<\/p>\n

\n\tMoore\u2019s 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\u2019re still living at home they\u2019ve already checked out. Her husband, Howard (Patrick Fabian), is a handsome stiff-necked jerk who treats Mona like an accessory. And she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the opening scene, set in the Brook Theater, she tries out for a small role in the annual local production of \u201cNosy Neighbors,\u201d and her audition is so weak that we don\u2019t see how she could possibly get the part. She doesn\u2019t. It goes instead to Serena Cherry (Bernadette Peters), a Broadway wannabe who lands any role she wants. (There\u2019s a poster of her in the lobby as the lead in a production of \u201cEvita.\u201d) But then, late one night, Mona gets a call from the musical\u2019s director, Jerry (Paul Giamatti<\/a>). Serena has bowed out; he\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

\n\tMona comes into rehearsal the next morning (the cast has been at it for several weeks), and what we instantly see is that \u201cNosy Neighbors,\u201d an upbeat musical about the residents of a downscale apartment building, is a corny but oddly sturdy piece of third-rate hokum \u2013 it\u2019s like \u201cRent\u201d 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, \u201cRent\u2019s due!\u201d Not exactly an acting challenge.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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\u2019s a doormat in life and a washout of an actress, even for community theater.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo Jerry, realizing that he\u2019s 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\u2019s holding in his hand \u2014 and more than that, he keeps asking her why she wants it, breaking down her defenses. It\u2019s 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\u2019t get it she\u2019ll 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\u2019t realize is that he\u2019s created a monster.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Debut\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a hilarious scene in which Jerry, as part of Mona\u2019s Method training, takes her out to a random apartment building, and she talks her way into someone\u2019s 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\u2019s all there was to it, \u201cThe Debut\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt wouldn\u2019t work if Mona\u2019s fearless new acting ethos weren\u2019t so goddamn funny. And it wouldn\u2019t work if Paul Giamatti, who\u2019s kind of playing the audience\u2019s surrogate, didn\u2019t 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 \u201cNosy Neighbors\u201d (they include Eisenberg) perform with sublimely subtle cluelessness. But it\u2019s the audacity of Julianne Moore \u2014 now clenched, now grinning, now timid, now acting \u2014 that brings \u201cThe Debut\u201d to its gratifying conclusion, as Mona, through the theater, discovers an extraordinary new role: herself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s rare these days to find comedy and humanity on the same plate \u2014 and even more rare…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,24594,41881,270,18748,261137,246016],"class_list":["post-615983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jesse-eisenberg","tag-julianne-moore","tag-movies","tag-paul-giamatti","tag-telluride-film-festival","tag-the-debut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}