Movies about separation usually unfold like tightropes; one misstep into melodrama or one laugh too far into cynicism can undo the whole thing. Yet, is this thing on? walks that line up with unusual confidence.
Bradley Cooper directs with a gentle understanding of imperfection, co-writing alongside Mark Chappell and Will Arnett, who also stars as Alex, a newly separated husband searching for a version of himself that exists beyond his marriage.
From its first moments, the film lets humor breathe alongside heartbreak. It opens not with slammed doors or bitter exchanges but with an uneasy silence between two people who once shared everything. Alex and Tess (Laura Dern) have been married for two decades.
They’ve built lives and raised children, and yet, somewhere between school pickups and late-night dinners, they lost the rhythm that once bound them. Cooper’s approach treats their parting not as an end but as an emotional recalibration. There’s affection in their distance, and that’s what makes the pain sting deeper.
The premise of two middle-aged exes learning how to communicate without the label of marriage might sound familiar, but the tone is what keeps it fresh. Alex’s venture into stand-up comedy feels accidental, almost clumsy. He takes to the stage one night simply to avoid paying the entry fee to a club.
What should have been a one-time rant about his failing marriage turns into an unexpected source of truth. His jokes are messy; his confusion bleeds through every line, yet the crowd laughs because pain dressed as humor often hits hardest.
Cooper’s direction invites the audience to laugh with empathy, never cruelty. Through the shaky handheld shots and soft lighting, we see Alex’s stand-up as an outlet, a mirror reflecting his personal growth. The film allows laughter to coexist with sadness, showing how joy and grief often share the same stage.
The Art of Falling Apart Gracefully
At its core, Is This Thing On? isn’t really about divorce. It’s about identity and closure, how two people can still care deeply for each other while admitting they no longer fit in the same narrative.
Laura Dern’s Tess is not painted as a villain or victim; she’s simply someone choosing honesty over comfort. Her arc runs parallel to Alex’s, portraying her as an individual embracing rediscovery instead of clinging to remnants of the past.
Tess explores small dreams long set aside. Once a star volleyball player, she’s now considering coaching again, a metaphor that’s neither forced nor loud. Cooper’s filmmaking respects her space as much as Arnett’s. The camera captures Tess not through Alex’s longing gaze but as her own story in motion.
It’s in these quiet shifts that the movie reveals its generosity. Both characters are lost, but they’re allowed to be lost on their own terms.
Arnett’s performance shines by embracing restraint. He portrays Alex as a man not broken by the separation but rattled awake by it. His awkward honesty in stand-up sessions becomes therapeutic. Each set on the stage turns into another form of confession, where laughter masks the ache of realization.
His evolving relationship with the mic mirrors his shifting relationship with Tess: uncertain, clumsy, but ultimately human.
The supporting cast enhances this emotional texture. Christine Ebersole as Alex’s mother brings hilarious bluntness, often defending Tess much to her son’s dismay. Their closeness, awkward but endearing, offers another layer of irony; the lines between family and ex-family remain blurred, and that’s oddly comforting.
Cooper himself, in a small role as Alex’s eccentric friend Balls, adds warmth and comedic interruption. His erratic, occasionally oddball energy provides levity in moments that could otherwise sink into sorrow.
Every conversation in Is This Thing On? feels slightly unfinished, which works to the film’s advantage. Life after separation rarely finds resolution neatly.
The film reflects that emotional ambiguity with careful pacing and dialogue that sounds authentic rather than polished. The characters stumble through feelings the way real people do, unsure, interrupting, contradicting themselves, yet trying to stay kind.
Bradley Cooper’s Direction Finds Humanity in Small Moments
While Cooper has previously proven his technical precision and emotional awareness as a filmmaker, Is This Thing On? showcases a more unguarded side of his direction.
Is This Thing On? (Credit: Searchlight Pictures)
The film operates with intimacy rather than grandeur. Instead of big moments, Cooper leans on subtle glances, long silences, and messy laughter. His camera often hovers close to Arnett’s face, reflecting both vulnerability and exhaustion.
The unsteady camera movements capture Alex’s chaotic mind; as he stabilizes emotionally, so does the visual rhythm. The cinematography becomes storytelling. Music enters sparingly, used not to cue tears but to remind the audience of nostalgia, the kind that lingers after familiar laughter fades.
Cooper’s ability to balance emotion with humor makes the film disarmingly relatable. It’s not interested in making judgments about who’s right or wrong.
Rather, it gently observes the aftermath of love. The screenplay avoids grand revelations about happiness or relationship advice; what it offers instead is truth soft, hesitant, and often funny.
By the film’s final act, Alex and Tess find a gentle understanding. They may not reunite, but they recognize the affection that remains beneath all the layers of frustration.
It’s this emotional honesty that leaves the strongest impression. The ending feels earned, not staged, a quiet acknowledgment that love doesn’t always disappear when a marriage ends; sometimes, it just changes form.
Cooper, Arnett, and Chappell manage to honor adulthood’s contradictions. The story recognizes that moving forward often means laughing at yourself before forgiving others. It’s about learning that endings can still bring connection, not because people stay together, but because they learn to see each other anew.
Why Is This Thing On? Feels Refreshingly Real
In a cinematic environment often obsessed with extremes, this movie stands out for its humility. Divorce films tend to polarize as either comedy-heavy or painfully dreary, but this one quietly manages both. The humor never erases the ache; the ache never overshadows the humor.
What makes it memorable is the sense of truth running through every performance. Arnett’s mix of humor and wounded confusion feels lived-in. Dern’s warmth gives the story moral grounding.
Together, they reflect the shared struggle of two people redefining peace after years of partnership. The supporting roles, though small, reinforce how community shapes recovery, from well-meaning friends to family members who refuse to pick sides.
Is This Thing On? isn’t loud or flashy; it’s tender and lucid. It reminds us that relationships don’t always collapse with a bang. Sometimes they just fade into quiet understanding. And when that happens, humor becomes a necessary medicine.
Bradley Cooper’s film isn’t about perfection; it’s about progress. It’s about standing in front of strangers, laughing through embarrassment, and realizing honesty is the only punchline that matters.
Even after its final scene fades, the feeling lingers like the last line of a good joke, bittersweet, true, and deeply human.
Imagine learning in one horrifying moment that your husband and sister were having a long-term affair, that both have died in the same car accident, and that your nephew’s paternity may never be known.
That premise alone screams operatic heartbreak. Yet Regretting You, the latest collaboration between filmmaker Josh Boone and author Colleen Hoover, feels strangely numb. What could have been a raw and emotional dissection of loss becomes a slow-moving film that observes tragedy from behind glass.
Boone directs from a script by Susan McMartin, adapting Hoover’s bestselling novel into something as emotionally flat as a television drama stretched to feature length. At its center is Morgan (Allison Williams), a mother balancing grief, betrayal, and guilt alongside her teenage daughter, Clara (McKenna Grace).
When a car crash takes both Morgan’s husband, Chris (Scott Eastwood), and her sister, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), the film reveals an unfolding chain of family deceit. But the sharpness of that revelation never cuts deep. Instead, the story drifts like a cloud that never quite rains.
The film’s structure toggles between past and present; 2007 teenage nostalgia collides with the dull ache of adulthood in 2024, but the emotional transitions are as stiff as their time jumps. The younger versions of Morgan and Jonah (Dave Franco) circle unfulfilled attraction; the older ones hover in guilt and confusion.
It should be messy, chaotic, and painfully human. Instead, Boone and McMartin render grief like an instruction manual, precise but sterile.
The Problem With Polite Heartbreak
Regretting You belongs to that strain of young adult melodrama that thrives on big emotions and moral reckonings. However, where The Fault in Our Stars (also by Boone) thrived on passion and grounded pain, this film barely feels alive.
The emotions are too tidy, the confrontations too polite. Even when the film dances around uncomfortable truths, it refuses to let its characters fall apart the way real people do.
Allison Williams struggles against the production’s restraint. Her Morgan carries enormous narrative weight, grieving not only her husband’s death but also the betrayal that followed.
Yet her face never fully communicates the density of that pain. She moves through grief like someone rehearsing sadness rather than feeling it. Even when confronting Jonah, the man who silently loved her for decades and is now reeling from the same loss, there’s no heat in their exchanges.
Dave Franco’s Jonah fares even worse. He spends most of the film whispering through scenes, lip-biting, and staring at the floor as if every emotion must stay half-swallowed.
His chemistry with Williams is virtually nonexistent; their grief scenes feel choreographed instead of cathartic. The supposed tension of unresolved love shrinks into awkward small talk.
The only heartbeat comes from McKenna Grace’s performance as Clara. She portrays adolescence with both defiance and tenderness, grounding the film with genuine emotion. Clara’s disbelief, anger, and slow realization of the truth about her family give the story its only sense of momentum.
Her scenes, especially the ones wrestling with teenage dreams and emotional distrust, offer fleeting glimpses of sincerity. Grace understands the story better than the film does; she finds what it means to be young and surrounded by adult hypocrisy.
The Weight of Regret Misused
Colleen Hoover’s writing has always thrived on heightened emotion, grief, love, and the ache of forgiveness wrapped in big moral gestures.
Translating that to film requires a nuanced touch: too restrained and you lose emotional urgency; too exaggerated and it turns syrupy. Boone’s adaptation lands squarely in the first problem: it refuses to feel.
Regretting You (Credit: Constantin Film)
For a story about devastating loss, Regretting You looks strangely calm. The visual tone feels overly polished, with bright lighting even in scenes meant to express despair.
Boone’s filmmaking flattens every tragedy into visual monotony. The camera rarely lingers long enough on faces to reveal conflict, instead cutting away before emotion can register.
Even more puzzling is the film’s reliance on text messages as storytelling devices. Animated bubbles pop up constantly, while voiceovers read their contents aloud as if to double-insure the audience’s understanding.
But rather than deepening intimacy, these moments emphasize distance. No amount of bubble animation can make us feel the connection these characters lack.
The relationship between Clara and her classmate Miller (Mason Thames) could have balanced the heavy adult tension, but it instead mirrors the film’s general blandness.
As for symbolism, Boone and McMartin play it safe. Nearly every emotional beat is accompanied by a song or a monologue that spells out feelings the actors haven’t been allowed to display.
There’s never a moment where silence speaks; the dialogue fills every space, even the ones better left aching. By sanding down the raw edges of Hoover’s story, the filmmakers betray its essence.
When Emotion Becomes an Afterthought
The tragedy of Regretting You isn’t just its plot; it’s the missed opportunity within its premise.
Beneath the melodrama lies a story ripe for tenderness and rage: generational guilt, broken trust, and the shared burden of secrets between parent and child. But the film handles these themes with such excessive caution that its emotional potential evaporates.
Boone’s direction suggests fear of sentimentality, as though breaking composure might break the film itself. Scenes that should vibrate with pain, like the moment Morgan learns her husband’s affair was with her own sister, feel almost procedural.
Even Clara’s discovery of the truth lands without the gut-punch it deserves. Instead of chaos, we get calm confrontation; instead of devastation, a shrug.
The pacing worsens this detachment. The middle stretch feels like a waiting room for an emotional reaction that never arrives.
Conversation replaces confrontation. By the time forgiveness surfaces, it feels mechanical rather than earned. The title itself, Regretting You, promises introspection, but the film never gives us regret’s raw form, only its theory.
Still, McKenna Grace prevents complete collapse. Her energy, humor, and flashes of honesty carry a pulse through the monotony. In a film where adults exchange glances instead of feelings, she makes confusion look alive.
Watching her makes one imagine what a more daring version of this story could have been, one that let its characters cry, break, and claw their way toward forgiveness.
When Tragedy Needs Truth
Regretting You end as it began: quiet, awkward, and emotionally restrained. Morgan and Jonah’s attempts at closure feel rehearsed rather than lived. The script gestures toward the inevitability of regret but never earns it. What remains is a film that feels too careful for its own story.
There are traces of what could have been a study in grief, loss, and misplaced trust, but Boone’s direction suffocates the very feeling it seeks to capture. Between too-smooth lighting, surface-level dialogue, and dull performances from its adult leads, the movie forgets that regret is a visceral experience, not a decorative theme.
A talented young actress like McKenna Grace deserves better; so does Hoover’s material. Somewhere inside this lifeless adaptation lies a story aching to be heard: that grief is messy, that love’s collapse deserves noise, and that forgiveness isn’t found in neat dialogue but in the chaos of heartbreak.
Until someone makes that version, Regretting You will remain true to its title; you’ll probably regret watching it.
