Everyone in Hollywood is selling themselves in Misty Green, including its protagonist, a once-successful actress whose Emmy Award-winning days are receding fast in the rearview mirror. The subject of Chris Rock’s fourth directorial effort, however, is really selling herself short, and though his character study/industry satire is a sporadically scattershot venture, it proves a breakout showcase for Rosalind Eleazar (Slow Horses), whose multi-layered lead performance makes it so you can’t look away.
The City of Angels’ homeless denizens and tent cities serve as an apt backdrop for Misty Green (screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and in theaters Oct. 9), which portrays the metropolis as a place where desperation and failure are always a hair’s breadth away.
For Misty Green (Eleazar, 38), disaster comes knocking—or, rather, bursting through the door—on another hungover morning via Celine (Amy Landecker, 56), who’s none too pleased to find the star in her recently deceased husband’s oceanfront apartment. Celine slanders Misty as a sugar baby and yet, upon recognizing her, pauses her tirade to read lines with her—the first of several sharp moments that italicize Los Angelinos’ knee-jerk attraction to celebrity. Misty’s renown, however, isn’t enough to prevent the woman from giving her seven days to vacate the premises.
This is a problem for Misty, since she has nowhere to go and no meaningful job prospects, the result of having earned a reputation for being a big-time pain in the you-know-what. Her tenure on a show called Red Eye continues to be her calling card, but her ability to dine out on it is fading, and the look of anger, frustration, and terror in her eyes comes from her awareness that, in Hollywood, growing older—and further away from one’s prime—is a death knell.
Thus, when a young actress at an audition asks for a selfie because, when she was growing up, Red Eye was her mom’s favorite show, it’s less a flattering request than a warning that lands like a punch to the gut.
Misty has a confidence that borders on cockiness, and during a conversation with her best friend Naomi (Anna Kendrick), her defiant refusal to work with numerous colleagues speaks to her self-destructive hard-headedness. She’s obviously someone who’s known around town as “difficult,” and as it turns out, that’s with good reason.
Tasked by her agent Randy (Topher Grace) to stay at home one evening to memorize lines for the next day’s audition, she instead goes out with Zach (Adam Driver), a slick-haired, goateed lothario with whom, in a club bathroom, she shares cocaine and carnal knowledge. When she arrives at the test and discovers her partying cost her the new script, her reading for casting director Rhonda (Tracie Thoms), who already dislikes her, nearly falls apart.
In this instance, what saves Misty from failure is both her imperiousness—a source of strength as well as weakness—and her undeniable talent. The latter lends her a borderline tragic dimension.
Eleazar embodies Misty’s contradictions with enlivening naturalness and fieriness, coloring her insolence and idiocy with flashes of tenderness and artistry, so it’s easy to see why people, even against their better judgment, are drawn to her. In a musical audition for Dreamgirls in which she delivers a knockout rendition of “One Night Only,” she’s downright mesmerizing, and Eleazar’s real triumph is making the many sides of her character seem like intertwined facets of a complex whole.
Misty’s fortunes begin to rebound when she runs into Jordan (Rock), a director who years earlier fired her from a project and yet remains enticed by her, and their blossoming rapport soon leads to a shot at starring in his forthcoming Dreamgirls project. Rock gives himself comedic dialogue that too often sounds like his stand-up (especially when he’s riffing on Hollywood and Los Angeles’ racial dynamics), and though some of his lines stick, there’s a shticky quality to his performance.
Better is Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah), who, as Misty’s bipolar addict brother (also named Jordan), so intensely inhabits the unstable young man—whose habit of scaring people with a fake spider speaks to his volatility—that he compensates for the character’s schematic plot function.
Run-ins with a nasty police officer (Anthony Anderson) and a subplot about a heard-on-the-radio search for a Black murder suspect strive to provide Misty Green with racial commentary, but the film is far sturdier when concentrating on Misty and her preternatural habit of being her own worst enemy.
Narcissism and need are in constant conflict as she struggles to keep herself from falling completely out of the spotlight and onto Skid Row, and her dire circumstances eventually make her susceptible to debasing compromise. Rock’s script suggests that this is par for the course in Hollywood, as evidenced by Naomi, who has an uncontrollable attraction to black men but is marrying a white guy (Rich Sommer) in order to secure a cushy inheritance.
Rock’s writing segues between incisive and superficial, and his attempts to capture L.A. in all its screwy glory are only partially successful. Nonetheless, with the magnificent Eleazar, he crafts a complicated heroine who embodies the city’s paradoxes, and his depiction of the industry’s seamier side is intermittently eye-opening, peaking with a party in Dubai that epitomizes the degrading lengths wannabe stars will go to keep themselves afloat. Driver is the embodiment of that ugliness, and in a small part, he exudes a calm, unruffled repugnance that’s all the scarier for being so seductive.
Misty Green bites off more than it can chew, such that late developments regarding Kaluuya’s Jordan feel half-baked and its coda comes off as a whimper. Still, when it stops trying so hard and simply concentrates on Misty’s inner torment, it gains its footing, offering a clear-sighted view of Tinseltown’s irresistible appeal and latent cruelty and danger.
For Misty, the threats posed by aging and her egotistical obstinance aren’t enough to kill the dream of once more making it to number one on the call sheet. Courtesy of Eleazar’s standout turn, which marks her as an actress of exceptional versatility and charisma, it’s all too easy to understand why the talented can’t let go: Succeeding when the whole world is watching you is nothing short of transformative.
