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The title character of “Misty Green,” Chris Rock’s explosively entertaining, savagely authentic drama about life in the Hollywood of today, is a television actress who
had a moment — in fact, she was close to the top of the heap. But that was then and this is now. Misty, played by Rosalind Eleazar (“Slow Horses”) with doleful charisma and a casual fury, is in her late 30s. She’s a vivid and acclaimed actress and singer who was popular enough to have won the Emmy for best supporting actress for her cult thriller series “Red Eye.” She was on the cover of Cosmo. People still talk about her show in reverent tones.
Yet it’s funny how time passes. At an audition, Misty is seated next to a young actress who’s awed to meet her, because “Red Eye” was her mother’s favorite show. Misty still has her looks, her talent, and her drive (everything you need, right?). And she’s still out there working it. But her career has been in a slump, and that kind of downhill mojo can take on a life of its own. Suddenly you look up and you’re a has-been.
It doesn’t help that Misty is an unapologetic party girl. She likes to drink, drug, and fuck whoever to the point that it’s getting more than a bit self-destructive. The night before that audition, she gets a text from Zack (Adam Driver), an oily tech power-player sleazebag who always has a harem of women around him, which he maintains by keeping them well-supplied with cocaine. Misty hooks up with him for a night of clubbing, snorting, and screwing in the bathroom stall, and the next morning she’s a wreck. But her hellbent hedonism, and the recklessness that grows out of what’s really an orgiastic form of self-medicating, didn’t happen by accident.
Misty is pissed off. The big picture of her career is that the industry, because of its values (and because of her defiant nature, though that’s the very quality that made her a star), is slowly but surely choking off her options. She’s Black, which is no deal-killer but still, in the eyes of too many, puts her in a box. She’s getting “old.” And she has slept around enough, and acted thoughtlessly enough, flying off the handle, that she has left a trail of enemies. There are too many people who look at her and think she’s trouble. In the new corporate Hollywood run by algorithm, trouble means not fitting into the machine. At the same time, Misty has been at the game for so long that she’s become a round-the-clock liar. She deceives and manipulates to survive, and that’s part of her performance vibe — she’s always acting. She’s a star, a diva, and a mess.
Last year, a lot of people clutched pearls over whether the title character of “Marty Supreme” was “likable” enough. Misty Green makes Marty look like an Eagle Scout. The movie, however, isn’t apologizing for its heroine’s bad behavior or making excuses for her. She has made her own bed. What’s mesmerizing about “Misty Green” is that Misty is part of an entertainment industry that has cut so many corners, and has so many pathologies, that it’s hard to separate the corruption she’s up against from her own self-inflicted damage. As a filmmaker, Chris Rock wants us to know Misty as if we were in her skin (he has cited the films of John Cassavetes, like “A Woman Under the Influence,” as one of his role models). At the same time, “Misty Green” is an amazing slice of showbiz sociology, riveting in the details of what a contemporary Hollywood actress — even a successful one — is up against. Rock isn’t casting stones. The warped values he depicts are there in the industry and in Misty herself.
In the eyebrow-raiser of an opening scene, we meet Misty in the fabulous beachfront apartment she’s been living in for four years. It belongs to the wealthy player she was the mistress of, who has just died; his wife walks in in a rage and demands that Misty leave. But then she recognizes Misty (like everyone, she was a fan of “Red Eye”), which provokes a suddenly sympathetic reaction. She’ll let Misty stay in the apartment for one more week. This scene, with its machine-gun insults and effusive obscenity, establishes several key things: that Hollywood is a place where people like Misty let themselves be used; that it’s a place that will toss you out; and that the sway of celebrity may be fickle, but it’s still all-powerful.
Misty is broke, without a home, and without too many prospects. (That audition is for a “street” role — in other words, what a Black actress is expected to do.) Yet she’s still Misty Green! And the movie, set against the ticking countdown clock of that week, uses Misty’s crisis of survival to take a spiritual inventory of Hollywood.
I knew it when I saw “Top Five,” the last movie he directed (12 years ago!), but now it can be shouted from the rooftops: Chris Rock is a major filmmaker. He is, of course, flexing different muscles here than he is as a stand-up comedian, but part of his delicious gift as a writer-director is that he draws on the extraordinary empirical powers that drive his stand-up. Like all the greatest comedians, he’s really a philosopher-detective, and the beauty of “Misty Green” is that it’s not some stylized “satire” of the new entertainment culture. The movie has laughs, a lot of them dark, but Rock has insisted that people call it a drama, and I get why he’s touchy on the point. The lure of “Misty Green” is its authenticity.
You feel that in your bones when Misty goes into the audition, and there at the table is Rhonda (Tracie Thoms), the veteran casting director who’s known her for so long that she can’t see who Misty is anymore. (A rival actress praises Misty to the heavens, all as a sly way of putting her down.) You feel it when Misty is dishing with her best friend, Naomi (Anna Kendrick), an actress who’s getting out of the business by marrying a finance dude (Rich Sommer) she’s far from in love with — and, in fact, she still yearns for random erotic encounters. But if that sounds chortle-worthy, it’s really expressive of the L.A. state-of-mind of the “Real Housewives” era, where everything is transactional. And you feel it in Misty’s encounters with Zach the demon of temptation, who’s both lover and pimp — one of those character roles that Adam Driver, with his quick-hit hustler’s aggression, is perfect for. Zack offers Misty 200 grand to go to Dubai and party with the royalty there. He’s asking her to prostitute herself, but the point is that Zack – and Dubai — is now part of the Hollywood chain.
Rock has cast himself in the movie as well. Acting with a jovial diffidence, wearing a porkpie hat he never takes off, he plays Jordan Green, a film director Missy once worked with (on an update of “Cinderella”), until she came in one day so high on coke that she punched a crew member. So Jordan is another burnt bridge, except that Rock, an infectious presence (even if he isn’t quite an actor), invests him with empathy and gives him a lot of fun lines (like his explanation of why “all Civil Rights movies suck”). Rock, with his scolding amusement, is there, in a way, to expound on the subtle racism of latter-day Hollywood, and to give Misty a break because of it. Jordan is directing a reboot of “Dreamgirls,” to be shot in Vancouver, and maybe this could be Misty’s second chance.
The other major character is Misty’s brother (also named Jordan), who is bipolar and turns violent whenever he goes off his meds. He’s played by Daniel Kaluuya, in his first screen performance in four years, and Kaluuya is a force. When Jordan erupts at a waiter for not bringing the bill to him, we see that his mental illness carries an echo of Nina Simone’s “irrational” rage. She was bipolar too, but this, the movie says, is the mad despair that a sensitivity to entrenched racism can drive you to. And Misty’s loyalty to her brother — to that side of him — is part of her undoing.
Yet Misty still has the goods. At the Roosevelt Hotel cabaret, she does a performance of Radiohead’s “Creep,” and it’s hypnotic. “Dreamgirls” would be perfect for her, and she and Jordan know it. Rosalind Eleazar shows us Misty’s duplicity, but she acts with such unguarded emotion that we’re desperate to see her burn through her problems and succeed. When she finally does her “Dreamgirls” audition, and sings “One Night Only,” it carries the film’s payload of hope and despair. Chris Rock is right: This is a drama. Yet “Misty Green” is put together with so much observational exuberance that it leaves you both daunted and exhilarated.
