Misty Green: Between a Rock and a hard place

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Edited by Steve Reiss

If Chris Rock could just get out of his own way, a lot of people would like, or at least appreciate, Misty Green, his latest effort as a writer-director.

Rock’s new film, from the trendy boutique studio and distributor A24, had its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival recently. It stars Rosalind Eleazar as the messy titular character, a mid-career Hollywood actor whose ascendance and paychecks have stalled. She’s been crashing in the otherwise unoccupied luxury pad of a wealthy executive, a relationship she swears to his irate wife (Amy Landecker) is a platonic one.

A clock starts ticking for Misty in the first act: she’s got to find a new place to live, with rent she can actually afford. She’s got to help her brother Jay (Daniel Kaluuya), who is struggling to manage a serious mental illness. And she needs a gig that will actually pay for those needs, a challenge with a difficulty level that’s ratcheted up because Misty is Black and she is no longer in her twenties. She’s highly recognizable, she has genuine talent, both as an actor and a singer, but recognition does not pay the bills. She’s got a reputational albatross, too. As an employee, she’s a pain in the ass. 

Rock plays Jordan Green, a decent-enough, middle aged director with dubious taste in men’s haberdashery. His career is also in need of a jumpstart after spending some time in director jail because Misty’s misbehavior torched their previous project together.

Misty is a rare specimen in today’s Hollywood: a Black feature film anti-heroine. She repeatedly makes terrible choices, but you still want her to be okay instead of ending up destitute and strung out. The film itself is ambitious in its effort to demonstrate the extreme wealth inequality in Los Angeles as precarity spreads further into the entertainment industry, with fewer people able to find jobs that provide a middle class standard of living. It gets a bit lost in its efforts to depict the multiple valences of factors complicating Misty and Jay’s lives—a miscast Anna Kendrick plays Misty’s closest friend in a mostly forgettable turn, an inversion of the Black best friend trope.

Eventually, having exhausted her other options, Misty accedes to an offer from a sleazy former co-star (Adam Driver). Throw in a couple of clever Devil Wears Prada Easter eggs in Tracie Thoms and Rich Sommer, and Misty Green is a solid comedy that offers a much-needed insider critique of show business, a strength it shares with Dolemite Is My Name (2019), Hollywood Shuffle (1987), and Opening Night (1977).

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Eleazar imbues Misty with the comfortable, casual aloofness of a former It Girl who’s still carrying a talent gun loaded with mojo. Eleazar’s rendering reminded me of Fleabag, the titular character created, written and played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. In the dramedy’s pilot, Fleabag, drunk on alcohol and self-loathing, knocks on the door to her father’s house at 2 a.m. 

“I have a horrible feeling that I'm a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist,” she confesses. 

This, in many ways, is Misty Green: a wildly talented, substance abusing mess of an actor who also possesses an inexhaustible stamina for sabotage–mostly of herself. It’s also exactly why I like her and Eleazar, the fearless actress who gives her so much irresistible spike. Misty is a trainwreck in an environment that demands perfection but offers little in return, save for the dubious reward of fame.

Eleazar makes watching Misty make bad decisions both enjoyable and harrowing. She makes the most of Rock’s witty one-liners, as when she spits out an explanation for the quicksand of irrelevance into which she sees herself sinking: “I’m too Black to be with Leo, I’m not Black enough to be with Damsin, I’m not a nepo baby, and I’m not a Brit!”

I see a lot of Misty in Rock. He too, is smart and savvy enough to know when his worth or potential as an artist is being undercut because of prejudicial forces he cannot control. And heaven knows Rock has a bad habit of wagging his tongue when he would be better served by silence—like the time he insulted Jada Pinkett-Smith at the Oscars. Or the time he made a documentary that insulted the choices Black women make with their hair. Or the time he told the New York Times that he let a friend’s innocent brother be incarcerated for murder for 19 years because he didn’t want to cough up the cash for a lawyer who might have been able to spare the man from the maw of the prison industrial complex.

Perhaps Everybody Hates Chris was less of a show title than an instruction to his audience. 

It’s true that Rock has undermined his previous films, which reliably boast excellent casting choices, with the taint of his personal misogyny. Consider Head of State (2003),  I Think I Love My Wife (2007), and Top Five (2014), which all feature Rock playing characters caught between two types of women: highly attractive, mercenary lunatics who employ their feminine wiles to manipulate him in service of their own ambitions, or suffering, saintly types who are beautiful, but do not aspire to be arm candy, and thus, are just not interesting to him.

And yet.

Dare I say, albeit with a healthy reserve of skepticism, that Rock appears to have turned a page—at least artistically. I don’t know what possessed him to make that confession to the Times about letting the innocent brother of his childhood friend rot in prison. Maybe he just enjoys getting yelled at by Black people.

Nevertheless, he’s made many a laudable choice in Misty Green, including casting Eleazar and hiring Kira Kelly as cinematographer. Misty is neither siren nor saint, but a genuine, flesh-and-blood, fully realized woman, complete with all the attendant frustrations that come with being one. Thank goodness Eleazar was ready for her close-up.

Misty Green is in theaters now.