There is great acting and not-so-great acting, and then there is whatever on earth Julianne Moore is doing in The Debut. In this piercing, feverish comic drama from Jesse Eisenberg, Moore stars as Mona, a mousy New Jersey housewife who is cast in a minor role in a local production of a fictitious musical set in a Manhattan apartment-block: imagine Rent, but 300 per cent straighter.
By the end of the first day of rehearsals, both she and her despotic director Jerry (Paul Giamatti) have realised there is a problem: not only is Mona a terrible actress, she barely seems to understand what acting is. But with his initial encouragement – which soon turns to open-jawed chagrin – she decides to “go method” in pursuit of the most raw and truthful performance she can give.
You are watching a woman who can’t act being played by a woman who very much can, and the result is as psychologically scrambling as it is spiritually elating. Through Mona’s naivety, determination and ineptitude, Moore lays bare the toll of a lifetime of being underestimated and overlooked. The result is devastating and uproarious all at once: on opening night, when Mona finally performs her big solo number, This City May Have Chewed Me Up (But It Hasn’t Spit Me Out), my eyes filled with tears, and I’m not entirely sure what kind they were.
It helps that The Debut unerringly captures the spellbinding naffness of so much American musical theatre. What we see and hear of the show, which is titled Nosy Neighbors, is awful. Yet to the mostly young, idealistic actors it obviously means the world, and though you initially resist, their passion is catching.
Halle Bailey, who starred in the ill-fated live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, is a beam of sunshine as Mona’s friendliest castmate. And Giamatti is note-perfect as the small-town arts-world tyrant who rules over the lot of them. Despite never quite making it as an actor himself, Jerry still believes sincerely in theatre’s capacity to nourish the masses, even through musical numbers that liken romantic dry spells to clogged toilets (All Blocked Up, which is performed by Eisenberg – who also wrote every song here – in an amusingly paltry walk-on role).
Like John Cassavetes’s Opening Night, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, The Debut is about the transformative, destabilising power of performance. Unlike those other films, it dares to ask: does it matter if the performance itself isn’t that good? Moore, Eisenberg and co needn’t worry on that score; they’ve just made one of the films of the year.
Screening at the London Film Festival. UK cinemas from January 15