Is This Thing On? at London Film Festival: Bradley Cooper’s hilarious homage to John Bishop
Is This Thing On? starring Bradley Cooper, review and star rating from the London Film Festival: ★★★★
It is 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 stand-up routine to help him 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 charismatic Alex says: “I wasn’t unhappy with our marriage, I was unhappy in our marriage.”
We follow Alex trialling new material in grungy New York comedy clubs and the pair negotiating on childcare while separating their lives into different houses. Arnett and Dern’s chemistry pops, and it’s a less is more approach 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 deftly and precisely cut – Cooper never lets his own back-patting take away from the 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. John Bishop has an executive producer role, and has perhaps too much of a rose-tinted view to present a raw portrait of the darker parts of what is essentially his own breakup. You sometimes struggle to believe they’ve actually separated, but it doesn’t derail the comedy, 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