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Jesse Eisenberg has made his most significant debut to date.
There is a delicious irony at the center of “The Debut,” Eisenberg’s third feature as a director, which world premiered at the Telluride Film Festival: it
is a film about a nobody who attacks a bit part as if it were the role of a lifetime — and it arrives as one of the fall’s genuine best picture contenders, ready to make Oscar darlings out of Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti.
Rebecca Keagan of NBC News moderated the Q&A with Eisenberg, Moore and Giamatti. It was Giamatti’s first time seeing the film.
Call it Eisenberg’s “Black Swan” by way of “Whiplash” and “Waiting for Guffman,” the whole fever dream staged inside a faux musical and relocated to a New Jersey rec center. Moore plays Mona Friedman, a meek housewife who hasn’t sung in front of anyone since church choir and is unexpectedly cast in a community-theater production — then transforms into a zealous method actor willing to wage war over a marginal role. Giamatti is Jerry, the tyrannical director billed, without irony, as the biggest name in New Jersey community theater. It is funny, then feral, then unexpectedly moving and it confirms that the filmmaker who won Kieran Culkin an Oscar with “A Real Pain” knows exactly how to build a showcase around actors.
A24 sets it for Dec. 11, a release date that signals a studio going long — and A24 knows this walk. Twice it has turned an unlikely film into a best picture champion: “Moonlight,” which stunned the favored “La La Land and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” an absurdist multiverse comedy that had no business winning and won anyway. “The Debut” hands the studio a broad, playable contender with two of the most beloved actors alive at its center.
Start with Moore, who has quietly become the film’s frontrunner-in-waiting. She is a five-time nominee with a single win — “Still Alice,” more than a decade ago — and Mona is the sort of tragicomic tour de force that reintroduces a great actor to voters who may have forgotten how much they owe her. She plays it balls to the wall, fearless in the way of Natalie Portman or Cate Blanchett at full tilt. On Telluride’s Saturday afternoon screening, she drew spontaneous applause in the middle of two separate scenes — the kind of response that tells you everything.
A sixth nomination is automatic. The win is the question, and the recent past is on her side: the modern Academy has grown notably comfortable handing out second — and even third — acting Oscars. Anthony Hopkins for “The Father,” Emma Stone for “Poor Things” (Stone, tellingly, produces “The Debut”), with Frances McDormand and Sean Penn all tripling up in recent years. A second Moore statuette would surprise no one.
Giamatti’s case is different, and in some ways sweeter, because he is chasing his first. One of the most admired actors of his generation has never won — the “Sideways” snub remains a scar on the branch’s record, and his leading turn in “The Holdovers” lost to the “Oppenheimer” juggernaut. As Jerry, he has the flashier, more quotable role: the monstrous mentor, the archetype that won J.K. Simmons an Oscar in “Whiplash” but with heart. He also gets what may be the film’s best line — “That’s where everyone wants to be … center stage.” His likeliest and most winnable lane is supporting, the very category Culkin swept for Eisenberg two years ago. Lightning tends to strike the same script twice.
There is something lovely, too, in the pairing of this and “Elsinore” on the same mountain: the two biggest swings at Telluride this year are both love letters to acting itself.
“The Debut” is less a musical than a savage comedy about one — a movie set in the world of an original show rather than a wall-to-wall songbook. That distinction matters.
Drew Daniels, fresh off “Anora,” shoots it; Emil Mosseri, an Oscar nominee for “Minari,” scores it; Bernadette Peters and Halle Bailey enrich an ensemble with real Broadway bona fides. Eisenberg, himself a screenplay nominee for “A Real Pain,” has written another original that plays far bigger than its logline. It has the bones of a lighthearted Tarantino picture spliced with the DNA of “Stranger Than Fiction” — and it arrived at Telluride with a résumé, then left with a possible frontrunner status.
There are no small parts, the old theater adage goes, only small actors. “The Debut” turns the cliché into a thesis and dares you to disagree. Your move, Academy.
