Culture
Her Big Night, Julianne Moore and The Debut at Lincoln Center
Emma Stone, Bernadette Peters and Halle Bailey turn out as Jesse Eisenberg's community theater musical plays the New York Film Festival
The plot is about a woman nobody notices. The premiere was the opposite. On Wednesday night, Julianne Moore walked into Alice Tully Hall for the New York premiere of The Debut, and half of Broadway seemed to follow her through the doors.
Emma Stone was there. So were Halle Bailey, Paul Giamatti, Cara Buono and Bernadette Peters, who posed on the carpet beside the film's writer and director, Jesse Eisenberg. Page Six, which ran a gallery of the arrivals, said A24 brought out the big stars. Photographs distributed by The Associated Press place the screening at Alice Tully Hall as part of the 64th New York Film Festival.
Stone is not in the film. She helped make it. Deadline reported when the cast was announced last year that Stone, Dave McCary and Ali Herting of their company Fruit Tree would produce. She was photographed on Wednesday with both of her partners, which is the kind of red carpet picture that says more about who did the work than about who wore what.
A Housewife, an Audition, a Musical Called Nosy Neighbors
The Debut is a musical comedy, and it is about the smallest stage there is. Moore plays Mona Friedman, a homemaker in New Jersey who has not sung a note since her church choir days. She tries out for a community theater production of an original show called Nosy Neighbors. When the company's grande dame decides the part is beneath her, Mona gets it. Then the part gets her.
Peters plays that grande dame, a community theater legend named Serena Cherry, and according to TheWrap's account of the Telluride premiere, the film opens on her audition number. Giamatti plays Jerry, the demanding director who runs the show. Bailey plays the production's sweet young leading lady. The rest of the company is stacked with Broadway names, among them Lilli Cooper, Bonnie Milligan, Colton Ryan, Craig Bierko and K. Todd Freeman.
Eisenberg wrote the songs himself. Emile Mosseri wrote the score, and the Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler staged the numbers for the show within the show. One of Moore's big moments is a song titled "The City May Have Chewed Me Up, But It Hasn't Spit Me Out," which is a fair description of most people who have ever tried to act in New York.
The plot is about a woman nobody notices. The premiere was the opposite.
Close to Home
Eisenberg has been plain about where the story comes from. He appeared in a string of Off-Broadway productions early in his career, and he did community theater before that.
"It is autobiographical," Eisenberg said at the question and answer session after the Telluride premiere in September, as reported by TheWrap. "I did community theater, and the people there made me feel so very special, just like what happens to Mona."
Moore, for her part, has been brushing off the praise. At the same Telluride session, Giamatti called watching Moore pretend to be a bad actress "the most entertaining thing ever." Her reply was short. "Anyone could have done this part."
Critics have not agreed with her. The film has been building momentum since it opened at the Telluride Film Festival on September 5, then moved on to Toronto. New York gave it a slot in the festival's Spotlight section, and for a film so steeped in the theater, the room on Wednesday had the feel of a hometown crowd.
The Road From Here
The festival has been a showcase for actors this fall. Jordan Firstman brought Club Kid to the same campus, and the opening weekend began with a 35mm print and a crowded slate. The Debut fits that mood. It is a film about performance made by people who perform, screened for an audience that knows exactly what an open call feels like.
It is not finished traveling. Variety reported in August that The Debut will close the BFI London Film Festival on October 18 at the Royal Festival Hall, with Eisenberg and his cast expected to attend. In the United States, A24 opens the film in theaters on December 11.
Eisenberg's last film as a director, A Real Pain, earned an Oscar nomination and won a BAFTA, as Variety noted. That record explains some of the attention. The rest is Moore. She has spent decades playing women who hold everything in. Here she plays one who finally lets it out, on a folding stage in New Jersey, under bad lights, in front of her neighbors.
On Wednesday the lights were better. The neighbors were famous. And for a couple of hours on the Upper West Side, a movie about a nobody belonged to one of the most recognizable actresses in the room.