{"id":598795,"date":"2026-09-13T05:52:17","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T05:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/598795\/"},"modified":"2026-09-13T05:52:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T05:52:17","slug":"misty-green-review-the-best-movie-about-hollywood-in-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/598795\/","title":{"rendered":"Misty Green Review: The Best Movie About Hollywood in Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe title character of \u201cMisty Green<\/a>,\u201d Chris Rock<\/a>\u2019s explosively entertaining, savagely authentic drama about life in the Hollywood of today, is a television actress who had a moment \u2014 in fact, she was close to the top of the heap. But that was then and this is now. Misty, played by Rosalind Eleazar (\u201cSlow Horses\u201d) with doleful charisma and a casual fury, is in her late 30s. She\u2019s a vivid and acclaimed actress and singer who was popular enough to have won the Emmy for best supporting actress for her cult thriller series \u201cRed Eye.\u201d She was on the cover of Cosmo. People still talk about her show in reverent tones.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet it\u2019s funny how time passes. At an audition, Misty is seated next to a young actress who\u2019s awed to meet her, because \u201cRed Eye\u201d was her mother\u2019s favorite show. Misty still has her looks, her talent, and her drive (everything you need, right?). And she\u2019s still out there working it. But her career has been in a slump, and that kind of downhill mojo can take on a life of its own. Suddenly you look up and you\u2019re a has-been. <\/p>\n

\n\tIt doesn\u2019t help that Misty is an unapologetic party girl. She likes to drink, drug, and fuck whoever to the point that it\u2019s getting more than a bit self-destructive. The night before that audition, she gets a text from Zack (Adam Driver<\/a>), an oily tech power-player sleazebag who always has a harem of women around him, which he maintains by keeping them well-supplied with cocaine. Misty hooks up with him for a night of clubbing, snorting, and screwing in the bathroom stall, and the next morning she\u2019s a wreck. But her hellbent hedonism, and the recklessness that grows out of what\u2019s really an orgiastic form of self-medicating, didn\u2019t happen by accident.<\/p>\n

\n\tMisty is pissed off. The big picture of her career is that the industry, because of its values (and because of her defiant nature, though that\u2019s the very quality that made her a star), is slowly but surely choking off her options. She\u2019s Black, which is no deal-killer but still, in the eyes of too many, puts her in a box. She\u2019s getting \u201cold.\u201d And she has slept around enough, and acted thoughtlessly enough, flying off the handle, that she has left a trail of enemies. There are too many people who look at her and think she\u2019s trouble. In the new corporate Hollywood run by algorithm, trouble means not fitting into the machine. At the same time, Misty has been at the game for so long that she\u2019s become a round-the-clock liar. She deceives and manipulates to survive, and that\u2019s part of her performance vibe \u2014 she\u2019s always acting. She\u2019s a star, a diva, and a mess.<\/p>\n

\n\tLast year, a lot of people clutched pearls over whether the title character of \u201cMarty Supreme\u201d was \u201clikable\u201d enough. Misty Green makes Marty look like an Eagle Scout. The movie, however, isn\u2019t apologizing for its heroine\u2019s bad behavior or making excuses for her. She has made her own bed. What\u2019s mesmerizing about \u201cMisty Green\u201d is that Misty is part of an entertainment industry that has cut so many corners, and has so many pathologies, that it\u2019s hard to separate the corruption she\u2019s up against from her own self-inflicted damage. As a filmmaker, Chris Rock wants us to know Misty as if we were in her skin (he has cited the films of John Cassavetes, like \u201cA Woman Under the Influence,\u201d as one of his role models). At the same time, \u201cMisty Green\u201d is an amazing slice of showbiz sociology, riveting in the details of what a contemporary Hollywood actress \u2014 even a successful one \u2014 is up against. Rock isn\u2019t casting stones. The warped values he depicts are there in the industry and in Misty herself.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the eyebrow-raiser of an opening scene, we meet Misty in the fabulous beachfront apartment she\u2019s been living in for four years. It belongs to the wealthy player she was the mistress of, who has just died; his wife walks in in a rage and demands that Misty leave. But then she recognizes Misty (like everyone, she was a fan of \u201cRed Eye\u201d), which provokes a suddenly sympathetic reaction. She\u2019ll let Misty stay in the apartment for one more week. This scene, with its machine-gun insults and effusive obscenity, establishes several key things: that Hollywood is a place where people like Misty let themselves be used; that it\u2019s a place that will toss you out; and that the sway of celebrity may be fickle, but it\u2019s still all-powerful.<\/p>\n

\n\tMisty is broke, without a home, and without too many prospects. (That audition is for a \u201cstreet\u201d role \u2014 in other words, what a Black actress is expected to do.) Yet she\u2019s still Misty Green! And the movie, set against the ticking countdown clock of that week, uses Misty\u2019s crisis of survival to take a spiritual inventory of Hollywood.<\/p>\n

\n\tI knew it when I saw \u201cTop Five,\u201d the last movie he directed (12 years ago!), but now it can be shouted from the rooftops: Chris Rock is a major filmmaker. He is, of course, flexing different muscles here than he is as a stand-up comedian, but part of his delicious gift as a writer-director is that he draws on the extraordinary empirical powers that drive his stand-up. Like all the greatest comedians, he\u2019s really a philosopher-detective, and the beauty of \u201cMisty Green\u201d is that it\u2019s not some stylized \u201csatire\u201d of the new entertainment culture. The movie has laughs, a lot of them dark, but Rock has insisted that people call it a drama, and I get why he\u2019s touchy on the point. The lure of \u201cMisty Green\u201d is its authenticity.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou feel that in your bones when Misty goes into the audition, and there at the table is Rhonda (Tracie Thoms), the veteran casting director who\u2019s known her for so long that she can\u2019t see who Misty is anymore. (A rival actress praises Misty to the heavens, all as a sly way of putting her down.) You feel it when Misty is dishing with her best friend, Naomi (Anna Kendrick<\/a>), an actress who\u2019s getting out of the business by marrying a finance dude (Rich Sommer) she\u2019s far from in love with \u2014\u00a0and, in fact, she still yearns for random erotic encounters. But if that sounds chortle-worthy, it\u2019s really expressive of the L.A. state-of-mind of the \u201cReal Housewives\u201d era, where everything is transactional. And you feel it in Misty\u2019s encounters with Zach the demon of temptation, who\u2019s both lover and pimp \u2014 one of those character roles that Adam Driver, with his quick-hit hustler\u2019s aggression, is perfect for. Zack offers Misty 200 grand to go to Dubai and party with the royalty there. He\u2019s asking her to prostitute herself, but the point is that Zack \u2013 and Dubai \u2014 is now part of the Hollywood chain.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tRock has cast himself in the movie as well. Acting with a jovial diffidence, wearing a porkpie hat he never takes off, he plays Jordan Green, a film director Missy once worked with (on an update of \u201cCinderella\u201d), until she came in one day so high on coke that she punched a crew member. So Jordan is another burnt bridge, except that Rock, an infectious presence (even if he isn\u2019t quite an actor), invests him with empathy and gives him a lot of fun lines (like his explanation of why \u201call Civil Rights movies suck\u201d). Rock, with his scolding amusement, is there, in a way, to expound on the subtle racism of latter-day Hollywood, and to give Misty a break because of it. Jordan is directing a reboot of \u201cDreamgirls,\u201d to be shot in Vancouver, and maybe this could be Misty\u2019s second chance.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe other major character is Misty\u2019s brother (also named Jordan), who is bipolar and turns violent whenever he goes off his meds. He\u2019s played by Daniel Kaluuya<\/a>, in his first screen performance in four years, and Kaluuya is a force. When Jordan erupts at a waiter for not bringing the bill to him, we see that his mental illness carries an echo of Nina Simone\u2019s \u201cirrational\u201d rage. She was bipolar too, but this, the movie says, is the mad despair that a sensitivity to entrenched racism can drive you to. And Misty\u2019s loyalty to her brother \u2014 to that side of him \u2014\u00a0is part of her undoing.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet Misty still has the goods. At the Roosevelt Hotel cabaret, she does a performance of Radiohead\u2019s \u201cCreep,\u201d and it\u2019s hypnotic. \u201cDreamgirls\u201d would be perfect for her, and she and Jordan know it. Rosalind Eleazar shows us Misty\u2019s duplicity, but she acts with such unguarded emotion that we\u2019re desperate to see her burn through her problems and succeed. When she finally does her \u201cDreamgirls\u201d audition, and sings \u201cOne Night Only,\u201d it carries the film\u2019s payload of hope and despair. Chris Rock is right: This is a drama. Yet \u201cMisty Green\u201d is put together with so much observational exuberance that it leaves you both daunted and exhilarated.
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