CHRIS ROCK’S “MISTY GREEN” HAS TOO MUCH ON ITS MIND

I'm still deciding how I feel about Chris Rock, the director.

His latest film, Misty Green, is a Hollywood-set dramedy about the soul-sucking nature of an industry that loves a comeback story almost as much as it loves deciding who doesn't deserve one. At its center is Misty (an absolutely mesmerizing Rosalind Eleazar), a 30-something actress whose brief moment in the spotlight is well behind her, largely because she's committed what might be Hollywood's greatest sin: burning too many bridges while being a Black woman.

There's a compelling story here about fame, forgiveness, and who gets to be difficult without being deemed disposable. Unfortunately, Rock's over-reliance on tired gender binaries (women be trippin', amiright?) keeps getting in the way. And what could've been a much tighter character study keeps wandering off to check on Misty's brother, his tragedies, his burdens, what it means to move through the world as a Black man. Rock becomes so preoccupied with his plight that, at times, you'd think he'd forgotten the title of his own movie.

SPOILERS FOR "MISTY GREEN" FROM THIS POINT.

Misty Green? That you?

Rock opens Misty Green with a black-and-white title card introducing the concept of "The Bag," that all-important symbol of wealth, status, and having made it. There's even a nod to the Hermès Birkin, a handbag supposedly more faithful than a husband. The somewhat heavy handed point is that Misty once had the bag, lost it, and would very much like it back.

You see, Misty Green used to be somebody. An Emmy-winning turn on a series called Red Eye made her one of Hollywood's most promising actresses, but that was years ago. These days, she's stuck auditioning for thankless roles alongside women half her age, picking up occasional singing gigs, and enduring young fans telling her how much their parents love her. She's famous enough to be recognized, but not famous enough for that recognition to do her much good.

It doesn't help that Misty's reputation precedes her. She's burned through professional relationships like wildfire, including one with director Jordan Green (Rock doing his best), and was once fired for punching a wardrobe woman in the face. Hollywood is hardly known for its generosity toward difficult women, but Misty doesn't exactly make a great case for herself.

Her latest crisis arrives in the form of Celine (Amy Landecker), the widow of a man who apparently promised Misty the apartment she's been living in. Celine shows up demanding that she vacate immediately, only to reconsider after spotting Misty's Emmy and a movie script. Out of pity, exhaustion, both, she ultimately gives Misty seven days to move out, but not without offering a little unsolicited, only-in-L.A. career advice on her way out: "Memorize your lines."

So now Misty has a week to find somewhere to live, get her career back on track, and generally pull herself together. Easy enough, assuming she can stop drinking, doing drugs, and antagonizing the people who might actually hire her.

Her agent, Randy (Topher Grace), has just about exhausted his patience. After another disastrous audition, he tells Misty what she's probably known for years: nobody wants to work with her because she's too difficult. "Is Hollywood racist? Yup. Is it sexist? Fuck yeah, it is. But don't act like you never had a shot," he tells her.

Outside of work, Misty's closest thing to stability is Naomi (Anna Kendrick), a straight-talking friend who listens to her spirals during their workouts near the Santa Monica Pier. Naomi is equal parts supportive, brutally honest, and refreshingly real, even helping Misty record an audition tape. Like Misty, she once harbored Hollywood dreams of her own, but unlike Misty she's now ready to trade them in for a stable life with an aggressively boring dude.

Not everyone in Misty's orbit has good intentions. Zach (Adam Driver), a sleazy filmmaker and occasional hookup, has an idea of helping Misty that involves drugs, extravagant parties, and a proposal that sounds a lot like sex work dressed up as networking. He offers her the chance to make serious money entertaining a wealthy emir at a party in Dubai, but even Misty has her limits..Until she doesn't.

As if Misty's life weren't complicated enough, her brother Jay (Daniel Kaluuya) shows up, fresh out of a psychiatric facility, needing a place to stay. He's taking his medication, but Misty's hardly in a position to be anyone's safety net right now.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles is on edge over reports of a Black man suspected of killing a white college student. The ongoing stop and frisk style search hangs over Jay's storyline, while Misty's increasingly unsettling dreams hint at a childhood neither sibling  has fully escaped.

Against all odds, Misty gets one more shot at the career she's spent years sabotaging: an audition for a lead role in a remake of Dreamgirls. It's the kind of opportunity that could finally pull her out of professional purgatory. The question is whether she can get out of her own way long enough to actually take advantage of it.

Don't act like you never had a shot.

Misty Green is an enigma. And given who's behind the camera, that doesn't come as a total surprise.

Chris Rock's discomfort with women has long been a fixture of his observational comedy, among other things. In his eyes, they're gold diggers, emotionally needy, "doomed" to become sex workers without proper parenting, and culturally overvalued as mothers while dads are ignored. In Bigger & Blacker, he famously declared, "Women want every fucking thing!" In Never Scared, he joked that his "only job in life" was to keep his daughter "off the pole." Even Good Hair, his documentary inspired by his young daughter's questions about Black women's hair, somehow found a way to spend more time scrutinizing Black women's beauty rituals and what they cost than unpacking the racism and colorism behind them.

And that's a shame because exploring what accountability and grace might look like for a messy-as-hell Black woman is a great premise. Misty is talented, but arrogant, self-destructive, occasionally cruel, and entirely convinced that the world owes her something. She's also a Black woman approaching 40 in an industry where even an impressive résumé won't save you from the crime of having another birthday.

Unfortunately, Rock's lesser instincts keep getting in the way.

Because somewhere along the way, a film that's supposed to be about Misty Green becomes a movie about her brother.

Having just been released from a psychiatric facility, Jay is determined to get his life together. He's taking his meds, starting a new job, and beginning a new relationship. But a fresh start is hard to pull off when the police seem determined to make you a regular customer. After being pulled over twice by the same cop (Anthony Anderson), despite having done nothing to warrant either stop, Jay finally goes too far and winds up behind bars. Misty, meanwhile, finds herself scrambling to come up with a small fortune for his bail and legal defense, even as the possibility of rebuilding her own career hangs in the balance.

To be clear, there's a compelling movie in Jay's story, too. And the relationship between the siblings, both carrying wounds from a childhood we only encounter in fragments. But Misty Green can't quite figure out how to tell both stories without one swallowing the other.

What gets lost in the shuffle is the more interesting story Rock started telling: the story of a prideful fuckup who also happens to be incredibly talented.

Which is too bad because Rosalind Eleazar is a fucking revelation.

Best known as the tough MI5 operative grieving her partner on Slow Horses, Eleazar bites into this gift of a role with grit, tenacity, and zero-fucks-given scrappiness. It's the kind of star-making performance that makes you want to grab Hollywood by the shoulders and ask what the hell it's been waiting for. She's brittle, vulnerable, and gloriously abrasive, finding the humanity in a woman who can be spectacularly unpleasant without asking us to excuse her behavior.

And if there were ever any doubt about Misty's talent, Eleazar puts that to rest the moment she starts singing. Her torchy rendition of "One Night Only" during the Dreamgirls audition is a knockout, while her stunningly heartfelt take on Radiohead's "Creep" at the Hollywood Roosevelt lounge is something else entirely. There's a rawness to both performances that make it painfully easy to believe every bit of the hype that must've surrounded Misty back in the day. For all the time Rock spends telling us how difficult she is, Eleazar makes it impossible to forget how gifted she is.

Daniel Kaluuya is equally affecting. Where Eleazar's Misty meets the world with her defenses up and her mouth ready, Kaluuya's Jay feels exposed to it. There's a fragility to his performance that never tips into helplessness, and a mounting sense of unease as the circumstances around Jay grow more threatening. When Jay erupts at a waiter at the Roosevelt for not bringing the bill to him, there's an undercurrent of rage that goes well beyond the immediate slight. Kaluuya makes you feel the accumulation of every indignity Jay has had to swallow, while his bipolar disorder complicates an anger that has plenty of reasons to exist.

Honestly, I almost wanted a whole movie about him.

Eleazar and Kaluuya are doing a lot of heavy lifting for a script that keeps getting distracted by its own ideas. And for all my frustrations with the storytelling, I never once questioned whether I wanted to keep spending time with either of them.

Read. Sing. Kill.

In the end, Misty lands the role of a lifetime. Unfortunately, she never makes it to set. Instead, she takes Zach up on his offer and heads to Dubai for coke, booze, and the quick cash she needs to bail her brother out.

There's a lot Misty Green wants to get off its chest. About the racial and economic fault lines running through L.A., a city with no shortage of wealth and very little patience for people who don't have any. About what happens when Black men are struggling with their mental health and the criminal justice system is more interested in making arrests than offering help.

But there's also a lot here about the regular life shit that gets in the way of chasing your dreams. About realizing that being good at something doesn't necessarily mean it's what you're meant to spend your life doing. About deciding what making it actually looks like for you, especially when the version you've been chasing comes at a cost you can no longer afford. And about understanding that walking away isn't the same thing as failing.

These are all worthwhile ideas,  and for most of its runtime, I could see the movie Rock was trying to make. But Misty Green gets so caught up in what it has to say about the Black American male experience that it completely leaves its Black woman lead behind.

7/10 ★ A star-making performance in a movie too distracted to notice.