Misty Green is a star. Just ask her. “I am a f–king star,” she says. “I wish people would treat me like one.”
Or just ask Chris Rock. He wrote and directed “Misty Green,” which opens with shots of Los Angeles set to the upbeat enthusiasm of Sammy Davis Jr. singing “If You Could See Me Now.”
The trouble is, if you could see Misty now, you wouldn’t necessarily think she’s a star. Because she’s also a f—ing mess, which has kind of gotten in the way of that whole star thing.
The thin line between stardom and total f–ked-upness is the territory that’s tread in Rock’s new feature: part tough but raucous and insidery Hollywood story, part character study with teeth. It’s very funny and pretty disturbing and quite entertaining until it starts to run out of gas. And even then, you can forgive it because of Rosalind Eleazar, the British actress best known for “Slow Horses” who has the pride and the pipes and the passion to embody the title character.
Eleazar is an unstoppable force playing a very stoppable force – stoppable, mostly, by her own misjudgments. You could say that Misty has been held back by sexism and racism and you wouldn’t be wrong, but the film makes it very clear that she’s mostly been held back by her own spectacularly wrongheaded decisions.
The film, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, is Rock’s first as a director since “Top Five” back in 2014. That one was about a successful comic (played by Rock) trying to cope with fame as he makes his first drama; by contrast, “Misty Green” is centered on a woman who’s been largely forgotten by the industry and is desperate to regain some of the mojo she had when she starred in a TV series many years ago. Both take satirical swipes at Hollywood, but from different directions: “Top Five” from the top down, “Misty Green” from the bottom up.
But it doesn’t always feel like the bottom. We first meet Misty when she’s asleep in a luxury apartment with a view of Santa Monica Beach. A woman walks into the apartment, spots Misty in the bed and declares, “Get out of my husband’s apartment! He’s dead!”
Misty, it turns out, was gifted free rent by a producer boyfriend who passed away quite some time ago, and whose wife is now getting around to evicting her late hubby’s mistress from a swanky pad she’d like to keep for herself. The angry widow relents a little when she spots Misty’s Emmy on a bookshelf, giving the TV star-turned-squatter a week to vacate the premises.
But Misty is broke – and worse than that, she’s unwilling to give up a very simple lifestyle: “I wake up when I wanna wake up, I sleep when I wanna sleep, I f–k when I wanna f–k.”
She trudges through Santa Monica and the camera stays behind her, as if it doesn’t want to get in her way. She runs into Jordan Green (Rock), a director who’s making a new version of “Dreamgirls” — a property that contains Misty’s dream role of Deena, the character modeled after Diana Ross and played by Beyoncé in the 2006 film. But she knows that role has already been cast, with a younger and hotter star who’s shown no real ability to sing.
“Brave of you,” she tells Jordan with a sweet but barbed smile, “to go with a non-singer.”
Of course, any notion that Jordan might recast Misty in the part seems far-fetched: The last time they worked together, he fired her after she came to work “coked out of her head” and punched the wardrobe girl in the face.
That’s Misty, and that’s “Misty Green.” If there’s something she can do to lose a job, she’ll do it. Go out clubbing and oversleep? Check. Forget to check her email and miss the new lines she’s supposed to have memorized? Check. Get in an auto accident with alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and fentanyl in her system? Check. Show up for work on “Shaft” and sleep with Samuel L. Jackson’s bodyguard, whose wife is best friends with Jackson’s wife? Check, and mate.
And yet underneath it all, she is prodigiously talented. At the nightclub in the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel one night, she sings a gentle piano-based version of Radiohead’s “Creep” that could tear your heart out. When she somehow wrangles an audition for “Dreamgirls,” she stuns the room with a wrenching new arrangement of the anthem “One Night Only.”
Later, she goes clubbing with a slick producer (Adam Driver), whose movies never get made but who seems to have a sideline running girls to Dubai for the pleasure of a rich emir. “I got one girl $200K for one night,” he tells her. “I can get you more.”
Her agent, meanwhile, is telling her something entirely different: “I don’t even know if I can get you a ‘Law and Order,’” he says.
Rock relishes the dishy Hollywood jokes, and he gives his director character a few monologues that wouldn’t be out of place in his own standup act. But the film is far from being an outright comedy; it’s not driven punchlines, but by Misty’s growing desperation over her career, her deadline to find a new place to live and her despair over the state of her bipolar brother (a heartbreaking Daniel Kaluuya).
The pressure mounts until there’s really no place to go with it, and it’s hard not to feel that in some ways Rock has painted himself into a corner. Ultimately, the way things wrap up feels abrupt and not entirely satisfying, though it could also be a gentle poke at Hollywood endings.
And yet “Misty Green” is a lot of fun, landing enough of its jokes and nailing enough emotional moments. Mostly, though, it’s a showcase for Eleazar – because unlike Misty Green, she really is a star.
“Misty Green” will open in theaters Oct. 9 from A24.
