Paul Giamatti! Julianne Moore! You’ll be surprised which one is the scariest!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits…

Last but not least: the festival’s Closing Night selection The Debut, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last month. It’s the third film from actor-turned-writer/director Jesse Eisenberg, whose Poland group-tour dramedy A Real Pain played at HIFF 2024 and won an Academy Award for costar Kieran Culkin. Not ready to slow down, Eisenberg nimbly switched gears for this comedy-about-musicals — wrote several all-new songs for its play-within-the-film and prerecorded a short, Heartland-exclusive thank-you that ran in front of our screening.

The Gist: Academy Award Julianne Moore is a meek New Jersey housewife named Mona whose cold-shouldering husband Howard (Better Call Saul‘s Patrick Fabian) and twin teenagers all treat her like she’s their unpaid intern. As the twins are about to graduate and leave the nest, one day her human-doormat self decides to audition for a musical part down at the community theater, even though she hasn’t sung publicly since she was in church choir a long, long, long time ago. It’s also quickly apparent that she’s never acted before, never been given an acting class or tip, and never held an audience’s attention. If you turned a spotlight on her, she’d flash-fry like an ant under a magnifying glass.

Mona gets the part anyway because nobody else in town wanted it. In Nosy Neighbors, a (fictional) generic musical about a meet-cute between two tenement tenants in the Big City, Mona will play Miss Danielle, the tough-talking super who collects rent, does chores and not much else because it isn’t that big a part. (My wife has given me greeting cards longer than her one “song”.) The veteran cast members welcome her with open arms and sincere smiles because they’re a safe distance from Broadway and haven’t devolved into opportunist backstabbers yet, but they all warn her the director Jerry (Academy Award Nominee Paul Giamatti!) can be really tough sometimes. One begins to expect Whiplash crossed with The Producers.

To our relief, Jerry isn’t a drill sergeant: he’s a seasoned professional with a firm idea of what’s needed, depending on the production and personalities involved. Mona just needs guidance…like, all the guidance. Also, full access to a range of personal expression that she’s kept stuffed in a mental closet since childhood. So first Jerry has to goad her out of that closet. As their push-and-pull continues and threatens to go from breakthrough to breakdown, Jerry begins to wish he could stuff her back in that mental closet. But the show must go on!

The familiar faces: The cheery, encouraging cast of Nosy Neighbors also features Halle Bailey (the live-action Little Mermaid herself), Lilli Cooper (Hazbin Hotel, the 2024 Heartland entry Sheepdog), and Maulik Pancholy (Jonathan from 30 Rock!). Somehow Eisenberg also found the free time to join the troupe for some song-and-dance, but doesn’t push his boundaries.

Havana Rose Liu (the recent indie Tuner, recommended) is Mona’s costumer. Susan Blommaert (the Librarian from John Wick: Chapter 3) is Jerry’s assistant, often emerging from nowhere whenever summoned. From Mona’s “before” life, Cara Buono (Stranger Things, Mad Men) is her insensitive “best” “friend”.

Other Broadway veterans include but aren’t limited to K. Todd Freeman (Buffy, A Series of Unfortunate Events) as the music supervisor and pianist, Danny Burstein (CBS’ Evil) as a supporter, and the Bernadette Peters in two scenes, one of them more surreal than the other.

The Impressions: I expected Giamatti to be an overbearing, perfectionist monster like some of his other characters. Au contraire: this time he’s the Doctor Frankenstein who creates a monster. In reality Moore is six years older than Giamatti and has done far fewer goofy kiddie films than he has, but she convincingly regresses into the psyche of a middle-aged shrinking violet, tapping into the guileless innocence of a sheltered, devalued life. Mona loves the camaraderie and her supportive costars and thinks all this is just so much fun! But her total inexperience and Jerry’s disappointment lead to the most hilarious scene, as the two of them work late together and he turns into a veritable shouting psychotherapist, pushing her to dive deeply through her lifelong repression to extract all her worst feels ever, and pushes and pushes and PUSHES her to stop being herself, and it’s pretty terrifying and it’s a bombastically profane moment and our theater exploded in tearful laughter.

And then we realize he kindasorta broke her brain. Mona discovers confidence for maybe the first time in her life, really digs into the role and the prepping, visits an actual apartment building for the firsthand experience, begins to swing too far in the other direction at her scene partners’ expense, and before long she’s going full Method, questioning the script and deciding she knows better than the original playwright (from, like, twenty years ago) what Miss Danielle would or wouldn’t do even though she just got here.

Lately Giamatti has been climbing up my vague list of favorite actors ever (see also: past Heartland closer The Holdovers, or his recent loathsome big-bad on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy) and keeps his streak going even as we feel Jerry losing the power struggle. He’s still got that masterful control of his doughy features to conjure the right expressions at the right time — his best punchlines are silent, often with just some deft tag-team coordination between a single eye and eyebrow for our maximal amusement. Jerry walks the thin line between a cartoonish blowhard and a seasoned authority who knows what he’s doing, has dealt with a lot in his career, and knows when it’s time for sympathy and when it’s time to drag a ballooning ego back down to Earth. Later in the film, he’s finally had it and nails a fiery speech about divas who hold productions hostage under the delusion that they and their character matter more than everyone else, when they forget the whole “community” in “community theater” and become little more than “a schoolyard bully”. (I’d love to know how many targets Eisenberg had in mind for this nakedly crowd-pleasing bit.)

But to a certain extent (when Mona isn’t sashaying beyond boundaries), the creative conflicts are all a part of the process. At its heart The Debut is a fond, playful salute to the sort of local theater that Eisenberg used to do in his youth before Zombieland and The Social Network and certain crappy blockbusters catapulted him to different stages. Nosy Neighbors is harmlessly fluffy (imagine a Hallmark revival of Rent) with its intentionally cheesy lyrics, choreography more suitable for Times Square street-performers than Broadway stages, and the non-competitive, we’re-all-in-this-together backstage atmosphere. Eisenberg and cinematographer Drew Daniels frame the amateur hullabaloo in numerous nicely composed shots (I had a tough time picking just one from the trailer) broadcasting affection for that world, despite the occasional aberration, such as one woman finally learning how to open up while threatening to shut everyone else down.

Distractions are thankfully few. It’s really weird hearing Princess Ariel dropping F-bombs even though I never saw that movie, and Act 3 slips into a unsmiling funk while Giamatti takes an extended time-out during Mona’s dark night of the soul. Though her descent into marquee madness has its humbling slapstick rewards (plumbing: not as easy as it looks!), it’s unnerving to sit with just her in that frame of mind for too long a stretch. But eventually The Debut bounces back just in time for opening night (“ALL THREE PERFORMANCES ARE SOLD OUT!” Mona screams in triumph at her old oppressors), in which Nosy Neighbors survives some slight reinterpretation and Our Players find freedom and/or joy in compromised collaboration.

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after The Debut‘s end credits, but they confirm at least one (1) genuine Broadway song was used. To be honest, an apparent medical emergency up in the balcony during the end-credits exodus made it really awkward for us to keep staring at the screen and pretending everything was fine, though more than enough helpers showed up. Hopefully they’re okay?