“Don’t Think Twice” About Skipping This One: Birbiglia’s Improv Comedy Is Missing The Comedy

Review, “Don’t Think Twice” — 1/2 of * star (out of ****)

Released July 22nd, 2016
Directed by Mike Birbiglia
Starring Birbiglia, Keegan Michael-Key, Gillian Jacobs, Kate Micucci
Running Time: 92 minutes
Box Office (in limited release): $679,404

Look, I get it. I get why people like this movie: it’s a charmed little world that director Mike Birbiglia invites us to in “Don’t Think Twice,” his second feature following 2012’s far superior “Sleepwalk with Me.” In it, Birbiglia plays Miles, the de-facto leader of a New York City-based improv troupe called “The Commune,” a group consisting of six friends struggling to make it big while performing weekly at their soon-to-be-closed theatre. When one of the members, Jack (played by Keegan Michael-Key), ends up auditioning and getting cast in a thinly fictionalized version of “Saturday Night Live,” the group dynamic is disrupted, causing each of the members to re-evaluate their desires and choices, specifically those of Miles, and Jack’s girlfriend (Gillian Jacobs’ Samantha.) Through these three we see the different paths available to performers. In Jack we see the guy who made it, in Miles we see the one who should teach and not do, and in Samantha we get the pure artist, someone who loves the work and doesn’t want the associations of fame and fortune to sully her craft.

What I don’t understand is the all-around adulation for a movie that never hits its target or truly examines the personality types and traits that go with these kinds of characters and set-up. It’s afraid of really examining the darkness associated with failure, delusions of grandeur, or the irreconcilable differences in people that cause them to grow apart irreparably. It’s so in love with its troupe that it refuses to put the individuals in harm’s way or give them any meaningful consequences. They start as a happy family and end as one. And anyone who has been around performers and has seen that sort of ambition, knows things never turn out so cleanly when competition is in play. The closest the film gets to this is a cringe-worthy scene where Jacobs has to perform solo, and uses the stage to set herself free from some societal pressures with which we’ve never seen her struggle. Michael Key enters last minute as part of the scene, and they effectively break up on stage under the guise of their performance. It’s the right instinct to contextualize an important character moment in a fresh way that taps into the movie’s theatrical universe, but the scene just feels undeserved by the time it happens, and it leads me to what is probably the biggest failure of the film: the group is not funny, and in no way do any of them seem good at improv.

I know some of the actors have a background in improv, but the sketches and moments meant to show them as talents only bring laughs from the fictional audience in their world. And in fact these fictional laughs are so loud, they only to magnified the fact that nobody watching the movie at my screening laughed along. We’re meant to understand that within this world they are funny, and we’re supposed to go along with it. But comedy and music don’t work like that. The worst thing a film about a fictional “great musician” can do is present mediocre music as its product. It’s an immediate way to lose credibility for its premise, because unlike being told a janitor is a great mathematician when seeing him scribble formulas on a chalkboard that we don’t understand, music and comedy are visceral, and they either work on our senses or they don’t. So when we’re told someone is a great musician or comedian, we need to see that greatness to believe it, otherwise we’re being told instead of shown. In this film, the lack of their funniness leads to us not believing that any members of the Commune improv troupe deserve their path, and for a character-oriented dramedy that’s a real problem.

I should be the audience for this already audience-limited film. I grew up in Chicago and heard the Del Close legends early, and I live in New York City now amongst the types of people this film is supposed to represent. So I am inclined to be more interested in this world than most, but by the time the credits rolled I saw very little truth in this depiction of it. I could forgive the clunky pacing and the strange way it rolls out its huge moments, but if I can’t laugh at people who are supposed to be funny the seams start to show on everything else. Birbiglia is a talented storyteller and performer for sure, but he’s not yet at the level of a filmmaker who knows how to hide his weaknesses through the medium. The universal acclaim for “Don’t Think Twice” has been a huge head scratcher for me, and I’m left to guess that the critical popularity of this movie is tied to the fact that most critics across larger cities already live within the audience of people that is familiar to the improv world. Ira Glass is one of the producers, and with him comes the mighty hand of today’s NPR-centric cafe society. I don’t say that disparagingly as I am myself a member of it, but I wonder if maybe those critiquing it are a bit too close to the source material to look at it objectively. It’s simply too guarded of a film to be anything more than light love letter to itself.

By Greg Brecher

This article was originally published at filmcorereviews.com