Words by JANE CROWTHER
Misty Green is a hot mess. A talented actress with an Emmy to her name, she’s burnt bridges with producers and directors, is a functioning addict and, after being evicted from her home, has just seven days to find a job. She also has a brother with mental health problems, an audition for a highly-prized role and a lucrative escort offer in Dubai. Misty needs to make good choices but self sabotages; getting wasted and missing new script pages for her audition, drinking and driving and worst of all, being a ‘difficult’ woman in a Hollywood she can’t see her place in. As a bi-racial woman in her thirties she tells her friend (Anna Kendrick) that she is ‘too Black to be with Leo, not Black enough to be with Damson, not a nepo baby and not a Brit’.
Turfed out of the apartment of her dead lover by his widow (Amy Landecker), Misty’s week is a firestorm. While her brother (Daniel Kaluuya, back on screen after a self-imposed break) turns up to cause chaos, she meets two movie producers with the potential to change her life. Adam Driver’s sleaze, Zach, dangling a cash carrot, and Chris Rock’s star-maker, Jordan, who could give her that much needed chance, even if she previously screwed him over on a project.
That fact that Misty always does the least considered thing and that we still want the best for her is largely down to a mesmerising performance by Slow Horses actor, Rosalind Eleazar (who might not be a nepo baby, but is British). Rock pulls the triple as star, writer and director and his study of LA and La-La Land – with its wealth disparity, racism, ageism and the coin-toss luck that careers are made of – doesn’t say anything particularly new about a craven industry. But his handing over of the enterprise to Eleazar is unexpected and fresh.
Simmering with vim and a diamond self-worth (even if she doesn’t treat herself very well), Eleazar’s Misty carries the film to create an underdog portrait that feels blood-and-guts real even if a few of the scenarios don’t. With a DGAF walk and an ability to telegraph rich interior life, Eleazar makes Misty convincingly conflicted and undeniably talented. In a scene that will likely attract awards interest Misty is talked over and ignored in an audition and uses her rage to power up, leaving the room with casting agents agog.
Rock peppers his film with industry haunts and speak, but also news reports of shootings and the streets lined with homelessness which some may find borderline smug. He throws in fourth wall breaks that seem to ask audiences how complicit we are in the build-them-up-knock-’em-down theatrics of stardom and the whether we might quite like watching a woman struggle. But he also understands how much viewers like to watch a star being born. In Eleazar he’s given us that.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of A24
Misty Green is out in cinemas now and will be available on Netflix in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia/New Zealand from 9 November