For her supporting role on a TV series, Misty Green (Rosalind Eleazar) was once heralded as a breakthrough actress. She has the Emmy to show for it. But having scorched a few champions of hers — including the director Jordan Green, played by Chris Rock — Misty is now undergoing dispiriting auditions and the occasional singing gig. She is a bit of a mess. She is also utterly watchable. Eleazar, of “Slow Horses,” brings emotional precision to her vivid performance.
Even so, Rock, who wrote and directed the film, begins “Misty Green” with a bait-and-switch, opening on a black-and-white intertitle of the word “Bag.” Definitions follow — about status and wealth — that will be especially familiar to fashion mavens to whom a Birkin bag is “more faithful than a husband.” (The Hermès clutch has more than a cameo here.)
After that terse tutorial in rarefied consumption, the camera follows a woman down an apartment building hallway, status bag swinging from the crook of her arm. Coming in hot, she’s not the titular character, but the widow of the man who gave Misty the ocean-view apartment she’s been living in. What transpires captures the racial and generational rifts between the two women as well as the sense of overlapping financial precarity.
The wife (Amy Landecker) goes from fury and a demand for Misty to vacate the premises immediately to something resembling an on-second-thought calculation after seeing the Emmy statuette and a movie script in the room. She gives Misty a week to leave and some only-in-L.A. advice: “Learn your lines.”
That reprieve acts as a frame for what will unspool over the next seven days as Misty tries to get her act together. That will be a tall order, given her elicit substance use and embittered attitude toward auditioning, often in front of people she’s burned. The palpable prickliness of the casting director Rhonda (Tracie Thoms) is no doubt warranted. And Misty’s agent, Randy (Topher Grace), is rightly wary. Rock’s character and Misty have a vexed work history, too. Although when they meet at the apartment building’s mailboxes, she feigns otherwise.
When Misty’s brother, Jay (Daniel Kaluuya), enters the picture to crash at her pad, her chances of achieving success dip. Is he taking his meds? (He is.) However, the news bulletins about a search for a Black male who is accused of killing a white college student and wounding her football-playing boyfriend has put the city, the police and Jay on edge. Misty has jagged dreams that hint at the siblings’ fraught childhood and her own mercurial moods.
Adam Driver plays Zach, an underproduced filmmaker. Driver imbues this purveyor of drugs and partaker of threesomes with smarmy ease. Zach makes Misty an offer he’s sure she won’t refuse. She does.
Sure, he’s a cad, but it is Zach’s conversation with Misty about whether they’re friends that introduces one of the film’s deepest themes. In a town of air kisses and transactional fondness, it can be tough to know the real deal. In a shimmering scene in which Misty sings at the storied Roosevelt hotel, Rock shows us. But first, the filmmaker turns up the dial on the clatter and chatter of the room. Is anyone listening? Does anyone else here see what Misty’s giving of herself? As if to answer, Rock homes in on Jay and Naomi, Misty’s best friend — with the unerring assist of the cinematographer Kira Kelly. Both characters are leaning in, their visages laying claim to affection. Turns out, Jordan was also listening and may have an opportunity for Misty.
The movie shares DNA with “Jackie Brown,” the 1997 yarn the writer-director Quentin Tarantino wrote for Pam Grier. But “Misty Green” is its own rooted tale, one that makes clear why Rock is such a talented comedian. He’s observant.
He also has something to get off his chest: about the racial and economic myopia of the industry and how the city ignores so many of its struggling residents. In a tart scene on a bridge walkway, Misty begs her agent for work. Nearby, a person sits on the ground with a sign presumably asking for change. Rock never treats them as equivalent, but shows the two forms of pleading, of desperation, that run parallel through the city. To the bitter-hopeful end, Rock refuses to let viewers get too misty-eyed.
Misty Green Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.
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