‘Don’t Think Twice’ (2016) ***/*****
Does anyone have a suggestion for something an ensemble dramedy could be about?
In pretty much anybody else’s hands, Don’t Think Twice would be a movie about a plucky young group of improv comics trying to make it big in the world of show business. In the grizzled and capable hands of writer/comedian/actor/director Mike Birbiglia (Sleepwalk With Me), however, it ends up being about something much more real — how unhealthy it is to try to “make it” as an artist instead of just being a person who makes art, and what insatiable black holes of need everyone who feels compelled to work in show business really is. It’s a dark subject for a movie that’s mostly looking to be a comedy, but that’s probably appropriate, because the funniest material generally comes from dark places.
There is still an improv group that serves as the focus of the film though. They’re called The Commune, and they consist of Miles (Birbiglia), who’s been around the longest, who teaches improv, and who clings to stories of the time he was “inches away” from becoming a TV star, Jack (Keegan-Michael Key), a charismatic student of Miles’ who actually does become a TV star early in the film, which kicks off much of its conflict, Sam (Gillian Jacobs), a talented upstart who lacks the ambition that everyone around her professes to have, Allison (Kate Micucci), the quiet member of the group who longs to be a comic artist, Lindsay (Tami Sagher), the rich girl who’s defensive about her privilege and insecure that she hasn’t done enough with it, and Bill (Chris Gethard), the soulful member of the group who’s dealing with an ailing father. Each member of The Commune is longing to be somewhere they’re not, they’re navigating obstacles that appear in their paths, and they’re dealing with the realization that their journeys might be completely hopeless. You know, all the standard late-twenties, early-thirties stuff.
The best thing about Don’t Think Twice is that every member of the ensemble gets at least a little bit of a character arc to go through, so by the time the movie is over they all feel close enough to being three-dimensional people for the journey they go through to have been worth your time. There’s a problem with relatability in the first act, where Birbiglia’s character is a bit too much of a sad sack and a bit too much of a predatory lech (seriously buddy, we need to have a talk about that near-beard you’re sporting) for you to really care about his misery over the fact that all of his contemporaries have passed him by, and Key’s character is a bit too touched by God for the struggles that come out of his inclusion in the cast of a Saturday Night Live stand-in called Weekend Live to be too terribly dramatic, but then Jacobs’ character is faced with a real plight that the movie can sink its teeth into, and as she emerges as, if not the main character, then at least the heart of the film, it gets better as it goes on. Jacobs proves herself to be a versatile performer with a face that’s full of vulnerability and emotion, and she’s the main reason that the dramatic elements of Don’t Think Twice end up being a success.
The comedic elements of the film are a bit more of a mixed bag. The main problem with making a movie with this premise is that improv comedy just isn’t very funny (you know, because it largely resembles a group of adults engaging in a tween girl giggle fit), and because we’re asked to sit through a lot of scenes of people performing improv comedy here, the film occasionally gets tedious. Improv comedy is like if neediness and insecurity took on some kind of semi-tangible energy form and then started sucking the chill out of everyone around it until all they were able to feel was social awkwardness. It’s exhausting. Don’t Think Twice could have given us a couple of brief montages of its characters doing improv to make sure that we fully understand what it is, but instead it makes us sit through several extended sequences of it taking place, which is mean. Like we all don’t know enough doomed 25-year-olds begging us to go to their improv shows every weekend already.
There’s an easy enough rapport between the main characters that watching them hang out and rag on each other in their off time is often funny though, and the movie really starts to generate giggles when it turns its attention toward parodying SNL. Seth Barrish shows up playing a Lorne Michaels stand-in referred to only as “Timothy,” and he absolutely nails the monotone, sociopathic, puppet string pulling boogeyman that Michaels’ public persona has turned into over the years. Also, there’s a fake indie rock band that serves as the musical guest for Key’s character’s first episode on the show, and their interpretation of what overblown, twee, faux-Maypole Dance nonsense indie rock has become over the last decade or so had me in stitches. Unless they were actually a real indie rock band playing a real song and I misinterpreted it as parody. In that case, oh my god.
What Don’t Think Twice really nailed about SNL though is what a toxic environment it must create when you get a group of performers hungry for their big break, put them in the same building, and then make them compete for TV time. If desire is the root of human suffering, then it’s the people who want to make it big as performers — the people who look for validation from complete strangers and identity from how many fame points they can earn on an imaginary scoreboard — who must suffer the deepest. With the advancement of digital technology and social media, it’s started to seem like anyone could have an opportunity to become famous — if they could just come up with the right angle, if they could just push themselves to be interesting enough — and with his work here, Birbiglia has shown that he has a deep understanding of the suffering in store for the fame-obsessed generation of Youtube People who are just now coming of age.
