The Debut Review: Julianne Moore Gives a Russian Nesting Doll of a Performance

I never participated in community theater, that peculiar intersection of (sometimes) professional-grade talent and a hobbyist’s after-hours work schedule. But I did get to join a couple of school plays back in my younger days, and it’s easy to remember the sense of kindness and togetherness that emanates from people gathering round in order to create—or in many cases simply to play.

One suspects writer-director Jesse Eisenberg misses that kind of innocence in his craft as well. The longtime Hollywood veteran, and more recently indie director who guided Kieran Culkin to an Oscar win for A Real Pain, also cut his teeth as a child actor along the community and Off-Broadway footlights of New Jersey and New York City. He knows those boards so well that he’s affectionately recreated them in his third feature, and what more than likely will be the feel-good dramedy of this coming holiday season, The Debut.

A love letter to the uncanniness of quasi-professional theatricals, as well as tribute to the actor’s method (both generally and with a capital “M” in the Stanislavski sense), The Debut is a showcase for Eisenberg’s muses, not to mention a powerhouse spotlight for Julianne Moore, who gets some of the best material of her career via the role of Mona. At a glance, the character’s a meek and closed off-housewife, but by this time next year she’ll very likely become every high school theater kid’s go-to Halloween costume when she transforms into Miss Danielle, the Big City super who sings about how NYC might have “Chewed Me Up (But It Hasn’t Spit Me Out!”).

This is getting ahead of ourselves, though. Before Mona becomes a down on her luck Manhattan super, she’s initially a buttoned-up suburbanite living in a beige, if swanky, New Jersey conclave. It’s there she raises her newly autonomous teenage kids with a husband (Patrick Fabian) who seems more inclined to enjoy their neighbor’s company when they get dinner at the same restaurant every week. It is that quiet emptiness which makes the prospect of auditioning for a new community production of an innocuous Broadway musical comedy, Noisy Neighbors, seem so tantalizing. At last this could be a fun distraction for the former choir kid!

That assumption would be her first grievous mistake in the eyes of Jerry, Paul Giamatti’s cantankerous regional theater director who carries himself like Orson Welles at his most imperious. Her second error was not, well, knowing how to really act or apparently sing. But after Jerry’s first choice for the relatively minor character of Miss Danielle bails on the production, leaving a note that she found role too small for her talents, Jerry is in a bind less than three weeks from opening night. So he gives Mona a call that will utterly transform her life.

Much of the joy about The Debut is how unabashedly it places dollops of nostalgia on its visions of behind-the-scenes camaraderie; even “the drama” that permeates most of the gossip one associates with any workplace, never mind those populated by the literally performative, is treated with a fond sweetness. So many showbiz portraits and tableaus yearn for the dirt-beneath-the-fingernails bluntness of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, or Alejandro Inarritu’s deliberately self-aware pretensions about the tortured artist in Birdman. Eisenberg goes for something a little less jaded. In fact, it’s quite wholesome at the start with novice Mona being welcomed into the world by leading lady Stef (Halle Bailey), cast in the ingénue part of “Girl in 4F” in the play-within-a-movie.

This could be a writer-director’s own rose-tinted glasses, but I suspect it is also because the movie ultimately wants to celebrate the creative spirit, even while also quite forcefully interrogating those same pretensions and melodramatic tendencies that make mole hills into mountains vaster than Julie Andrews’ Alps. While Noisy Neighbors is a fictional Broadway show that has apparently been in regional repertory rotations for decades by the time The Debut begins, the songs we glimpse, all written by Eisenberg, credibly pass for something tuneful enough to have been staged at one point, but so saccharine few would ever take them seriously. Miss Danielle’s big solo is even sung, notably, over the opening credits with maximum fairy dust by the Bernadette Peters.

All of this sweetness is ultimately an act unto itself, though; a setup to suggest how low the stakes should be for Mona when she joins the ensemble. Nevertheless, it still marks a jumping off point from which Mona, Moore, and the audience will lose themselves into the agonies and ecstasies of artistic innovation. There are no small parts, they say, and thus no excuse to not totally submit your identity and soul beneath the Demands of The Theatre!

… There really is something tragicomic about a woman who is about to ruin her life in order to bring unflinching authenticity to what is ultimately a tertiary role born out of a treacly musical.

Mona’s sheer ineptitude for acting opposite even semi-professional actors is a source of great comedy early in The Debut, with Giamatti’s patented withering stare steadily intensifying as Moore flubs her single line (“the rent is due”) in rehearsals of the opening musical number. When his suspiciously Hollywood-levels of industrious assistant brings him his daily mocha, all Jerry can grumble is “it’s too late for that” while glowering at Moore. But it’s as the pair embark on the typical mentor-mentee arc that Mona/Moore take the movie to marvelous places. The humor is almost diabolical when Mona is finally driven to the point of considering her character’s motivations, being reduced to tears while lamenting that she will be living on the street and forced to eat rats if her tenants don’t pay her the goddamn rent. It’s also the scene that I expect Moore and A24 will use in Moore’s Best Actress nomination clip come Oscar night.

The further down the rabbit hole Mona goes, the more layered and dizzyingly self-reflexive Moore’s performance becomes. It’s a bit like a Russian nesting doll as the thespian must find pathos for an evermore gloomy and “real” Miss Danielle, which in turn quickens Mona with greater life and, finally, mania as she becomes drunk on the thrill of artistic discovery.

It’s a masterclass performance that, along with Giamatti’s own smooth transition from grumpy genius to suave co-conspirator, quite intentionally over-prepares for what is still, on all levels, light comedy. It also grows a little more substantial than the knowingly formulaic structure of Eisenberg’s story might otherwise need. In its heart, The Debut is more comedy than drama, but Moore and Mona lose themselves so completely to the beast that the details The Debut’s screenplay skims feel a little underdeveloped by the end. There are a multitude of threads dangling when opening night’s final bow comes, but the movie is already out the door.

It’s an open question whether Eisenberg leaving so much dramatic meat on the table is by design. This is, after all, a tribute to community theater and the lightest of theatrical entertainments; it is a tad bit masochistic if, like Mona, you keep digging deeper than that. But the ultimate charm of The Debut is even after it ends, it leaves character and audience alike in the trenches with a shovel, still eager to see how much deeper we can excavate this thing they call art.

The Debut played at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 7 and opens in theaters on Dec. 11.