Is This Thing On? review and star rating from the London Film Festival: ★★★★
In the strangest-sounding premise of any of the films premiering at the London Film Festival 2025, in Is This Thing On?, Bradley Cooper directs a biopic inspired by the life of Liverpudlian comedian John Bishop. It is less absurd than it sounds in practise: a touching comedy about a divorcing couple who get back together after wife Tess, played by Laura Dern, accidentally watches her husband Alex, played by Will Arnett, savage her in a comedy routine to get over their marriage.
Mark Chappell, Bradley Cooper and Will Arnett’s script is as hilarious as a blistering stand-up routine. It is both a touching story of comedy as therapy and a surprisingly nuanced examination of marriage. Inspired by John Bishop’s real-life experience with his own wife, there are plenty of lines that have clearly been extracted from the real world, and stick in the mind, like when Arnett’s humble, charismatic Alex says: “I wasn’t unhappy with our marriage, I was unhappy in our marriage.”
Arnett and Dern’s chemistry pops, but it’s less is more with Bradley Cooper, who only appears for fifteen minutes or so but gets the most side-splitting lines. He’s Alex’s insufferable best friend Arnie, an out of work actor with an inflated ego but an impeccable sense of comic timing. Cooper’s clearly having a riot seeing how far he can push this meta gag and it works because the film is so deftly and precisely cut – Cooper never lets his own back-patting take away from the central plot.
Is This Thing On? Bradley Cooper’s cameo in movie inspired by John Bishop is absolutely side-splitting
If I had to fault it, Is This Thing On? Is perhaps too sentimental towards Tess and Alex, John Bishop’s exec producing (like in the film, Bishop did reconcile with his wife after she saw him perform live) perhaps casting too much of his rose-tinted view on his own marriage to have allowed a raw portrait of the very bad bits. You sort of never quite believe they’ve broken up, and even though they’re broken up they flirt from the very early scenes. This is kind of the point: it’s true to the characters that they never did want to break up, although they could have probably hated each other a bit more at the very worst points to make us believe the split was real. It doesn’t derail the comedy though, which – both in stand-up skits and within the story – is hilarious and truthful.
Is This Thing On? will play in UK cinemas although no release date is yet confirmed