For his first film as director since Top Five 12 years ago, Chris Rock has made Misty Green, a cynical character study of today’s Hollywood, where you get the sense Rock is grinding some axes and settling some scores.
An examination of showbiz, like Top Five, Misty Green is a fascinating character study, featuring a strong performance at its center, some decent smaller performances around it, and great use of L.A. But it doesn’t cohere, and the exercise is hateful. It’s a version of Hollywood in which everyone’s some type of pimp or prostitute.
Rosalind Eleazar, the British actress from the spy show Slow Horses, stars as Misty, a past-her-prime actress who starred years earlier in a Shonda Rhimes-produced network drama but fumbled her career through self-sabotage, including drug use, abrasiveness, and burning bridges. She’s kept at it, even though it’s been so long since she’s had a hit that people keep telling her how much their moms loved her old Shondaland show.
When we first meet her, Misty’s living in a beachside apartment in Santa Monica, bought for her by her deceased ex-lover, when the man’s wife (Amy Landecker) shows up to throw her out. Around the same time, her brother (Daniel Kaluuya, in his first movie role since Nope four years ago) turns up, thrown out of a mental institution for lack of payment.
Broke and facing possible homelessness—as illustrated by the tent cities in the backgrounds of scenes—Misty needs to get some work, but she’s slighted just about everyone she could potentially work with. Her dream role is to play Deena in a new version of Dreamgirls, directed by Jordan (Rock himself), who she also has history with, but the studio would rather cast a young ingenue who can’t sing.
In his scenes, Rock delivers a few monologues that sound like Chris Rock stand-up routines. Despite that, the film is never funny, nor is it meant to be. A few familiar faces pop up to inject maximum cynicism, and there’s a lot here that’s straight out of the TikTok gender wars. A very good, against-type Anna Kendrick is Misty’s friend, who doesn’t let her recent engagement to a rich guy get in the way of her frequent affairs with Black guys. Or Adam Driver, the sleaziest you’ve ever seen him, as a movie director/pimp with a penchant for coke orgies who’s dangling a lucrative offer for a trip to Dubai.
Anthony Anderson shows up in the old Boyz N in Hood part as an LAPD officer who’s Black and racist. There’s a subplot about an unsolved murder of a USC student that’s far afield from what the movie’s about. And a scene at the end, complete with a cameo, just doesn’t land. My assumption is that this film is at least partially inspired by exaggerated versions of things Rock has seen and experienced in his time in Hollywood; I’d love to know which director inspired Driver’s sleezy pimp character.