Chris Rock’s acerbic tale of tarnished Hollywood dreams hits a nerve of disillusionment
Rosalind Eleazar stars in writer-director Chris Rock’s tale of a struggling actress.
Misty Green
Starring Rosalind Eleazar, Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya and Anna Kendrick
Directed by Chris Rock
Rated R
In select theaters now
This movie made me think of a quote from Marilyn Monroe about Hollywood. She said it’s a place “where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul.”
Standup comedian-turned-actor-turned director Chris Rock depicts the soul-sucking underbelly of Hollywood in this bitter kiss about a struggling biracial actress, Misty Green (Rosalind Eleazar), trying to make a comeback—with struggling being the operative word.
Rock can be a funny guy. He began his career as a standup comedian and cast member of Saturday Night Live. But Misty Green, which he wrote and directed, isn’t going for laughs. Instead, it’s drilling down to hit a nerve, and it does. It’s about the slippery slope of fame, about concessions and compromises and hard choices, about burned bridges and the challenges faced especially by Black actresses in a town where there are no guarantees, where racism and sexism are more than just subtle undercurrents.
Eleazar (from Apple TV’s Slow Horses) gives a gutsy, committed performance as Misty, at the center of a swirl of trials and troubles. She may have won an Emmy, but now Misty’s getting thrown out from the beachside apartment she’d been sharing with her married manfriend—by his righteously agitated wife (Amy Landecker). Misty’s brother (Daniel Kaluuya, who starred in the horror film Nope) has mental issues and needs coddling—and help that Misty can’t afford. Adam Driver is Zach, a wheeler-dealer filmmaker who gives her drugs in exchange for sex. Chris Rock plays Misty’s friend Jordan, a casting director working on a big new musical. Hey, maybe there’s a part in it for Misty?
Chris Rock plays Misty’s friend, a down-on-his-luck casting agent.
Or maybe she should just take Zach’s offer to hop a red-eye flight to Dubai in a private jet full of other party girls, to “entertain” a filthy-rich sheik—and return home with a designer handbag full of money.
There’s also Anthony Anderson (from TV’s Black-ish) as an L.A. cop, and Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect) as Misty’s friend Naomi. Topher Grace plays a talent agent.
The movie opens with a big-band rendition of the song “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” originally from the 1960s Broadway musical Sweet Charity, about a dance hall girl who comes into a bonanza of good fortune. Misty Green pairs the tune with scenes of familiar Hollywood landmarks and celebrities, but also street hustlers and homeless encampments. It’s a hint that we’re going to see the grit and grime that exists alongside the glitz and glamor, a lot of hardship to go along with a few hurrahs. In another moment, we hear a plaintive piano plinking out another familiar song, “California Dreamin’,” a few shades more somber than The Mamas and the Papas version.
“I am a f*ckin’ star,” Misty tells Jordan. “I just wished people would treat me like one.”
You have to wonder if Rock, who’s spent decades himself as part of the Hollywood hitmaking machine, is mining some of his own disillusioned experiences with the system and channeling them into Misty.
But Eleazar sells it, all of it, with gusto, this flip side of La La Land, this tale of broken dreams. She makes us want things to work out for Misty, to root for her, despite her flaws—her drug use, her promiscuity, her inability to find stability. And when Misty picks up a mic and sings in a bar at the Roosevelt Hotel, she puts a sublime confessional spin on Radiohead’s “Creep” with its lyric about “I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?”
Rock creates a biting portrait of what it takes to be an actor, to succeed in a town where show business is a machine with monstrous gears that can chew, mash and churn people into so much stardust. Where it’s hard to parse acting and role-playing from real life, and where Misty finds herself “riding the line between ho and hostess,” considering just how much of her soul she needs to sell.
It’s not perfect; sometimes it feels like the movie’s just too small to contain all of Rock’s sprawl of ideas, which come pouring out in conversations between characters, in jarring flashbacks and wrenching twists and turns.
I’m reminded of an old joke, about a group of people leaving the circus. After watching all the razzle-dazzle, the soaring acrobatics and the flashy lion tamers, they come across a guy cleaning out the elephant pen, covered head to toe in grime as he shovels piles of pachyderm poop. What an awful job, they gasp! They ask why he doesn’t find another job, something that doesn’t involve elephant excrement. “What?” he exclaims. “And leave show business???!”
It can be grimy, crappy road, Misty Green tells us, and sometimes—sometimes—it takes you where you want to go. Other times, you may find yourself posing for someone else’s selfie in an emergency room, sniffing and snorting a cocktail of drugs in a bathroom stall to ease the pain, or making a TV commercial—with Ice-T—for an accessory that could come in handy on the mean streets of Hollywood.
But the show, the California dreamin’, goes on.
—Neil Pond