DON’T THINK TWICE: An Improv Comedy Troupe May Not Be Alright

Now playing at an indie art house near me:

DON’T THINK TWICE (Dir. Mike Birbiglia, 2016)

Being a big Bob Dylan fan, the title of this film originally made me think of the legendary folk rock troubadour’s 1962 classic “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” but writer/director Mike Birbiglia wants us to relate the phrase to the rules of improv comedy.

Birbiglia, in the film’s brief yet informative intro, teaches that the three basic rules of improv are: “Say yes,” “it’s all about the group,” and “don’t think.” Birbiglia quotes improv guru Del Close to explain that there are no mistakes, that a player should “fall, and then figure out what to do on the way down.”

In his second directorial effort (his first was 2012’s charming yet a bit alarmingly autobiographical SLEEPWALK WITH ME), which he also wrote and produced, Birbiglia plays Miles, the 36-year old founder and longtime member of a Brooklyn-based improv troupe named The Commune.

The six member team is made up of the mostly recognizable faces of Kate Micucci (Garfunkel & Oates) as Allison, Tami Sagher as Lindsay, Chris Gethard as Bill, Gillian Jacobs (Community, Love) as Samantha, and Keegan-Michael Key (Key & Peele, KEANU) as Jack.

When Jack and Samantha, who are dating, get an audition for “Weekend Live,” the Saturday Night Live surrogate in the film’s world, it causes a riff between the players, particularly galling Miles, who claims that he had been “within inches” of getting a gig on the show back in 2003.

Jack gets cast, but his girlfriend Samantha freaks out and skips her audition, telling Jack that she was late and they didn’t let her in. The other Commune members hope that Jack can help get them hired as writers, but his new writing partner played by Adam Pally (Happy Endings, The Mindy Project) tells him to never, ever talk to the producer about his funny friends, advising that for his first year on the show “just don’t get fired.”

To add to the troupe’s troubles, their venue, The Improv for America Theater, is due to be closed in five weeks. Funnily enough, The Commune is told that another Trump building is going to go up in its place which leads to a bunch of Trump impressions (mostly variations on his catchphrase “you’re fired”) - notably, Birbiglia stressed on a recent guest appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah that the film was written years before Trump’s hellish campaign that we’re inexplicably still dealing with was mounted.

So as Jack settles somewhat uneasily into his new job, his former Commune cohorts try to deal with change. Miles gets reacquainted with an old high school crush (Maggie Kemper), Bill stresses over his father being hospitalized for a motorcycle accident, Lindsay self-medicates with pot when she’s not in therapy paid for by her rich parents, Allison frets over finishing her long gestating graphic novel, and Samantha gets sadder and sadder over the fact that things are changing as she wanted her days with the troupe to go on forever.

Then things get really dicey when they see Jack reproducing one of their collaborative sketches on “Weekend Live” with that week’s celebrity host (Ben Stiller as himself).

Birbiglia’s film is a well observed look at what it feels like when a member of an established group leaves for greener pastures. It could serve as a theatrical version of the 1992 Morrissey song “We Hate It when Our Friends Become Successful.” It gives us an idea of what it may have been like when Will Ferrell was plucked from the Groundlings (the LA-based sketch comedy troupe and school) for SNL, or any number of examples of comedy stars that left their fellow players behind for bigger things.

When Gethard’s Bill says “I feel like your 20’s are all about hope, and your 30’s are about realizing how dumb it was to hope,” it’s an extremely relatable realization that’s not alone as the movie is packed with such relatable realizations.

It may be a small indie film, but it’s about dreaming big even if it feels like the world is telling you to move on. Birbiglia’s Miles and the rest of the ensemble know they are aging past the point where their dreams can be fulfilled, but they also know that letting go is the hardest part. And it effectively questions whether friendships can survive such transitions.

DON’T THINK TWICE is a comedy drama gem that doesn’t have a wasted moment or miscalculated line in its perfectly tight 92 minute running time. It makes good on the promise of Birbiglia’s debut, SLEEPWALK WITH ME, as it also plays upon the pathos of the difficult world of damaged people trying to make an anonymous audience laugh.

It wraps up nicely on a note of hope too, with Roger Neill, who provided the score, performing a touching instrumental piano version of the famous tune that shares the film’s name to accompany the end credits. So it appears that Birbiglia’s sweetly bitter love letter to improv has something to do with the Dylan song after all.

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At Best, The Crude, Cute KEANU Is A Mild Chucklefest

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

KEANU
(Dir. Peter Atencio, 2016)

If you’ve been to the multiplex lately you may have seen a poster for a movie named KEANU featuring a cat wearing a baseball cap sideways, a do-rag, and chains over what looks like a bullet-proof vest.

But comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s first feature film after wrapping up their Comedy Central show Key & Peele after five seasons isn’t really about a hip hop gangsta cat – no, that’s just a selling point. The most dolled up that the cat gets in it is in do-rag and chains.

It’s really about two nerdy friends, cousins actually who live in the suburbs, who have to affect tough thug-like personas in order to infiltrate the Los Angeles criminal underworld to get back their kidnapped kitten.

The kitten named Keanu - reportedly they were working on the screenplay around the time that JOHN WICK came out - was found by Rell (Peele) on his doorstep right after he was dumped by his girlfriend, so he immediately falls in love with the brown tabby.

A few weeks later, when Rell and his cousin Clarence (Key) are out at the movies, Rell’s apartment gets broken into and they come home to find that Keanu is missing. Rell freaks out, calls the police, then figures that his pot dealer Hulka (Will Forte in cornrows) who lives next door might know something about the break-in.

Hulka points Rell and Clarence in the direction of “the 17th St. “Blips,” a supergang comprised of Bloods and Crips, that use a topless bar called Hot Party Vixens as their headquarters. That’s where they have to do some heavy code switching to get to the Blips’ leader, Cheddar (Method Man), who has Keanu in his possession and has named him New Jack.

Cheddar mistakes Rell and Clarence for The Allentown Brothers, a pair of psychopathic gunmen (also played by Key and Peele), and makes a deal with them that if they make a delivery of his new drug called “Holy Shit” they can have the cat.

Rell and Clarence, or TekTonic and Sharktank as they’ve started calling themselves, meet up with Cheddar’s crew: Hi-C (Tiffany Haddish), Bud (Jason Mitchell, Trunk (Darrel Britt-Gibson), and Stitches (Jamar Malachi Neighbors), and proceed to fake their way through a series of shoot-outs set-pieces which get a bit tiresome.

It feels weird to say that an R-rated comic action movie that drops the f-bomb and n-word seemingly every minute is a light comedy, but the shoe fits as I think I mainly giggled mildly under my breath throughout. Peele and co-screenwriter Alex Rubens are obviously going for a PINEAPPLE EXPESS-esque takedown of action movie tropes, in which our heroes actually get bullet injuries and many people get killed, but these types of '80s-style scenarios that always seem to climax with a mansion shoot-out have simply been satirized to death.

Key and Peele’s characters would be funnier if they were fleshed out more - I can’t even remember what jobs they were supposed to have – and a sideline subplot about Clarence’s wife (Gabrielle Union), who’s away on a weekend trip with their daughter and a friend (Rob Huebel) and his daughter, saying on the phone to Clarence that Huebel has been inappropriate seems like it’s a small bit from a sequence that had been largely cut (I bet that there’s a deleted scene from it on the upcoming Blu ray/DVD).

However, I did adore the setup, including the opening church massacre scene, that’s shot a la John Woo in stylish slow motion, as much as I adored Keanu the kitten (or the seven kittens that played Keanu), and was amused by random moments like Key smoking some “Holy Shit” and hallucinating that he’s in a George Michael video (there’s a running gag that Key is a big fan).

I kept waiting for big laughs that never came, so the best I can say is that the cute, crude KEANU is a mild chucklefest. Even if you’re a hardcore fan of Key and Peele (or cats), you may want to consider a matinee.

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