‘Is This Thing On?’ takes a little while to find its rhythm, but once it does, it turns out to be quietly clever and unexpectedly moving in its portrayal of a marriage falling apart. What’s striking is that the breakdown isn’t caused by anything sensational: there’s no violence, no betrayal, no obvious villain. Instead, it’s about two people who are no longer quite themselves, no longer happy together, but who also slowly realize that life outside the marriage isn’t necessarily any easier or more fulfilling.

The protagonist, Alex (Will Arnett), drifts through this emotional limbo almost by accident. One evening, he finds himself peering through the window of a comedy club and learns that if he performs a routine, he won’t have to pay the entry fee – otherwise it’s fifteen dollars or so. He’s never done stand-up before, but he wanders on stage and simply starts talking about his personal difficulties. What begins as a throwaway decision becomes, for him, a form of therapy. I found that deeply relatable – especially as someone who’s used radio and podcasting as a kind of confessional space myself.

At first, he’s tentative and unsure. There are long silences. He doesn’t know how to structure what he’s saying, and he’s certainly not ‘funny’ in any conventional sense. But something happens: the act of speaking out loud, to strangers, begins to give him confidence. He starts to grow into it, and once he does, he can’t quite let go. The stage becomes the one place where he’s able to articulate what he feels but can’t express elsewhere.

One of the film’s most powerful sequences comes when Alex performs at a different venue on a night when his ex-wife is on her first date since their marriage ended. She has no idea that he’s taken up stand-up – he’s kept it from everyone – and she ends up witnessing not just his performance, but his acerbic, brutally honest dissection of their relationship. She’s appalled and fascinated in equal measure, watching her private life transformed into public material.

Laura Dern, who memorably played a divorce lawyer in Marriage Story, takes on the role of Tess, the wife, here, and she plays it in a grounded, emotionally credible register. The film is inspired by the life of John Bishop, transplanted from Liverpool to Manhattan, and there’s a small but telling detail where the lead character wears a Liverpool FC shirt – a quiet nod to the story’s origins.

We watch the former couple drifting into unfamiliar spaces: Alex’s cramped one-bedroom apartment, the clubs and rooms where he performs, the new social worlds they’re both tentatively entering. What’s genuinely powerful is that while he’s confused, unhappy, and emotionally adrift in daily life, on stage he’s able to impose some order on his experience. The comedy routine becomes a diary, a way of making sense of trauma, and something the film handles with sensitivity.

Crucially, when Tess hears the routine, it doesn’t spark recrimination or rage. Instead, it brings them closer. For the first time, she understands why the marriage felt so suffocating to him – not because he ever explained it directly, but because he finally found the language to articulate it elsewhere. He has no idea she’s in the room, and if he did, you sense he’d never have gone there. That’s part of the film’s quiet insight: it’s often easier to confess to strangers than to the people we love most.

There’s something genuinely funny, too, in the moment when Alex realises he’s effectively ‘having an affair’ with his ex-wife – and processes that revelation during an open-mic session. The comedy doesn’t just entertain; it becomes a mechanism for discovery.

One question the film leaves intriguingly open is whether he’s using comedy to try to get closer to his ex-wife or whether he’s simply discovering that ever more raw, unruly, and inelegant material is what fuels his performances. Either way, ‘Is This Thing On?’ understands something fundamental: that self-expression can be both healing and destabilising, and that telling the truth doesn’t always look tidy… especially when it finally finds a stage.