'Misty Green' Review: Chris Rock Directs a Second Act That Stays With You

Misty Green has an Emmy, a face strangers still recognize, and seven days to get out of the house she has been living in. The house was her boyfriend's. He is dead, his widow has come to claim it, and the film wastes no time mourning any of it. It hands her a deadline, an audition, and a week where everything she has avoided comes due.

The audition is the engine. Jordan Green — a director with power and a past with Misty neither enjoys remembering — is mounting a new screen version of Dreamgirls, and Deena is the part she was built for. She knows it. He knows it. The distance between knowing it and landing it is the whole movie.

Seven Days, One Audition

Rock wrote the film, directed it, and plays Jordan — his first feature behind the camera since Top Five in 2014. The symmetry is right there: a comeback story built by a man the industry had also filed away. He has the discipline not to underline it. Nobody in Misty Green gives a speech about second chances. They just keep missing rent and cues while one approaches.

Around Misty, the week assembles its hazards. Her brother Jay (Daniel Kaluuya) surfaces mid-crisis, brilliant and unwell — the one person she cannot perform for. Zach (Adam Driver), a former colleague, offers help that arrives with an invoice attached. Somewhere in the week sits a proposition — Dubai, first-class, paid companionship — that would fix her finances and end her self-respect in one afternoon. Her best friend Naomi (Anna Kendrick) holds the steady ground: a couch, a camera for the self-tape Misty keeps sabotaging, and no patience for the lie that everything is fine.

Watch: the official trailer

Rock, Behind the Camera

The directing is the revelation, and it is a quiet one. Rock shoots Los Angeles as two cities sharing a zip code: the golden town of the mural Misty dances past, and the rented rooms and audition waiting areas where careers actually end. He lets scenes run past the point where a comedy would cut away. An audition is allowed to hurt for its full length. A kitchen-table conversation with Jay sits in its own silence until the silence says what nobody in the room can.

What he withholds matters as much as what he shows. Misty's self-sabotage is in the frame — the missed pages, the wasted nights — but the film never stages it as spectacle or begs the audience to forgive her on any schedule but hers. The feeling accumulates anyway: small shames, stacked daily, until their weight becomes the stakes of one song sung for a room full of people deciding her future.

The Performances

Rosalind Eleazar carries all 103 minutes, and the film knows better than to help her. Toronto's programmers billed hers as a career-making performance. They undersold it. She plays dignity as physical labor — chin up, shoulders set, voice steady — while the circumstances keep invoicing her for it. When Misty finally sings, the moment lands because Eleazar has spent the whole film showing what it costs her to stand still.

Kaluuya, in his first live-action film role since Nope, does the least and leaves the deepest mark; his Jay is funny until the second he isn't, and the sibling scenes give the film its floor of consequence. Driver turns Zach's charm rancid by degrees you could set a watch by. Kendrick makes decency interesting, which is harder than it looks. Rock the actor underplays beautifully: Jordan holds Misty's second chance in his pocket, and he plays a man who knows what that power costs the person asking.

Where It Strains

Honesty requires one paragraph of dissent. It is short. The Hollywood machinery around Misty — the agents, the rooms, the arithmetic of who gets cast and why — is ground other films have covered recently. A subplot or two resolves on schedule. But every time the machinery creaks, Rock cuts back to a face, and the argument ends there. He is not interested in exposing the town. He is interested in one woman the town is done with, and the film never loses sight of her.

Now on Netflix, After a Quiet October Run

Misty Green is streaming on Netflix in the United States now — it arrived Monday, November 9 — after a Toronto world premiere in September and a limited October theatrical run that grossed barely $160,000. It runs 103 minutes, rated R. That shrug looks worse by the week. The film the streaming era claims to want is sitting one click away.

A Second Act, Earned

A film about a second act is getting one, and for once the symmetry is earned rather than cute. Misty Green asks the oldest question show business has — what is a person worth after the town has priced her at zero? — and answers with a performance, a week of small humiliations survived, and a director patient enough to let feeling build at its own speed. It takes hold in the first scene and then, scene by scene, declines to let go. Previously grade: 4.75 out of 5.