There’s a mighty, all-guns-blazing performance at the centre of Chris Rock’s cynical Hollywood-set spiral Misty Green, a spark of fire almost put out by the relative dampness of the film surrounding. British actor Rosalind Eleazar, best known for her work in Slow Horses, has probably vaulted herself into a strangely underpopulated best actress race with her turn as a struggling actor trying to grapple her way back to the middle. Eleazar does enough here to go much higher.
Misty has an Emmy for her role on still beloved TV series Red Eye but it sits on the shelf of an apartment paid for by a married, and recently deceased, benefactor, right next to the empty liquor bottles and a rolled-up bill used for last night’s cocaine. The film throws us into her final week there, as a brittle, short-tempered widow (Amy Landecker) gives her seven days to find somewhere else to live, not easy in a city like LA and even harder when she’s unable to find work. Her lack of employment is both a result of an industry that doesn’t have a place for someone like her (she’s “too black to be with Leo, not black enough to be with Damson, not a nepo baby and not a Brit”) and also her difficult temperament, stuck in a “one-sided beef with Shonda” and choosing wild, drug-fuelled nights over bright-eyed morning auditions.
The week sees all sides of her life crashing together as bipolar brother (a welcome return for Daniel Kaluuya even if he’s given very little of note to do) returns after a stint at an institution, sleazy fuck buddy (Adam Driver, believably seedy) offers her a well-paid yet morally questionable gig in Dubai, closest friend (Anna Kendrick) wrestles with her new life as a faithful future-wife rather than struggling actor after a surprise pregnancy and a chance encounter with a director she once fell out with (Rock himself) leads her to a potentially life-changing career opportunity.
It’s Rock’s first film as writer-director since 2014’s similarly industry-based and similarly so-so Top Five and it feels as if in that time away, even though he’s not exactly been absent, he’s insisted upon himself a need to comment on everything that’s happened since. So the film often feels like an overcooked mix of a standup routine (Rock’s character has a funny bit on why all civil rights movie suck), a diatribe against a still-racist industry (Misty is auditioning for a comically awful role that sees her talking like a character in My Pafology) and a more serious look at both America’s poorly handled mental health crisis and its grim state of race relations (a subplot follows the media covering the death of a white woman, allegedly, at the hands of a Black man). It’s a plate stacked precariously high and the more we can feel Rock trying to point out what he wants to say the further it takes us away from the plight of Misty herself.
For a film centered on, and named after, a female character, there’s a sourness to how Rock sees women whose problems seem to be almost exclusively of their own making and whose conflicts seem to only come from other women. At first I appreciated how the film didn’t easily turn Driver’s pimp-adjacent snake into a more obviously snarling villain until I viewed him in comparison with some of the other women (Landecker is bitter and shrewish, Kendrick is obsessed with fetishising Black men while other women are jealous, bitchy or ruthless). Rock’s character is also funny, wise and forgiving, an ocean away from the tempest of Misty (it’s at least safer ground for him as an actor after his embarrassing turn in the absolute catastrophe that was the Saw spin-off Spiral).
It’s to Eleazar’s great credit that, despite this and the increasingly convoluted motions of the script, she’s able to carve out her own space in the film. It would be too lazy to play Misty as all desperation or all rage or all sadness but she effortlessly flickers between them all, from hard to soft and warm to cold in a heartbeat, and we understand why her magnetism would make her stand out in an audition while also getting why her temper would immediately act as a cause for concern. One of the film’s sharper running jokes, as Misty tries to snag a role in a new Dreamgirls adaptation, is that musicals keep hiring actors who can’t sing and, smartly, Rock has hired a lead who really can. As obvious as it might be on paper, Misty singing Radiohead’s Creep at the Roosevelt hotel is genuinely moving.
It’s maybe telling that one of the film’s most wrenching scenes is using dialogue written by someone other than Rock, though. As one would hope and expect, there are funny moments – Misty’s agent telling her “Good news: Meagan Good has the flu”, Busta Rhymes playing Busta Rhymes at a debauched Dubai party, Rock riffing as a version of himself – but his dramatic hand is a little too heavy especially in a stiff and schematic last act. Misty is the kind of character I often enjoy having a difficult time with, someone you love to hate and hate to love, pushing us away in one scene and pulling us back in another, but Rock doesn’t give us enough of that juicy back-and-forth tension or place her in enough dramatically knotty situations. He busies himself with his many jumbled subplots rather than focusing on his heroine while also, in the finale, forcing her hand in a way that simplifies who she is and how she acts. I wanted more from Misty but Eleazar gives us everything she’s got.
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Misty Green is premiering at the Toronto film festival and is out in US cinemas on 9 October and will premiere at the London film festival in October with an Australian release to be announced
