‘Twice’ takes us into wistful world of improv
By Michael Phillips
“Don’t Think Twice” is one of the best films of the year, as well as an unusually delicate movie about the brutal business of being funny for a living.
Writer-director Mike Birbiglia, who co-stars as a Brooklyn-based improv veteran, fears his big break happened somewhere else without him.
As a filmmaker, Birbiglia works in a low key to get at the dynamics and tensions found at the heart of improv, a performance genre that goes wrong very much more often than it goes right.
He doesn’t bore us with improv history. In a deft prologue “Don’t Think Twice” teaches a bit about the seminal Compass Players, where Mike Nichols, Elaine May and so many others came up. And longform improv champion Del Close is quoted in the opening voice-over, by way of his credo: “Fall, and figure out what to do on the way down.”
Slight, compact but extremely sharp, the film concerns the members of a fictitious troupe, the Commune, modeled on the Groundlings in L.A. and the Compass, iO and Second City in Chicago.
Birbiglia’s script, apt in its details and behavioral quirks, generates just enough narrative conflict to keep the whole thing from floating away.
Sleeping perfunctorily with a steady stream of his improv students, 36-year-old Miles (Birbiglia) once came “within inches” of landing a job on “Weekend Live” (plainly “Saturday Night Live” by another name).
The hungriest Commune member is Jack (Keegan-Michael Key), whose girlfriend, Samantha (Gillian Jacobs) is also in the troupe.
When a couple of “Weekend Live” cast members show up at one of their shows, Jack can’t help himself: He goes rogue, starts showboating and pulls out his best Obama impres- sion. (Key, of course, does a pretty good Obama.)
The screenplay deals with some of the Commune members getting hired by the TV show, and the others not.
Meantime, the troupe is getting evicted. Their Brooklyn storefront is about to become an Urban Outfitters. One of the performers, the doggedly insecure Bill (played by a wonderful Chris Gethard) copes with a family crisis.
Working various day jobs and nursing varying degrees of disappointment, the ensemble members support each other even as times grow tougher and more bittersweet.
Like improv itself, “Don’t Think Twice” is all about the tightrope that straddles generous and selfish comic instincts, as well as the one spanning the gorge of potential failure, night after night.
A few years ago, Judd Apatow made “Funny People,” about tricky, envytinged friendships among stand-up comedians trying to get a toehold in Hollywood. Here and there, that film nailed its milieu, though ultimately the plot mechanics and the whining took over.
At its best “Don’t Think Twice,” valentine on one side, cautionary tale on the other, harkens to some unexpected films not explicitly about improv comedy — Paul Mazursky’s “Next Stop, Greenwich Village,” or Barry Levinson’s “Diner” — but very much in the improv spirit, about dreamers living in what Stephen Colbert refers to as a “humorocracy.”
The first shot in Birbiglia’s film shows us six cafe chairs on an empty stage. It’s a perfect, somewhat forlorn image, setting up later moments of quiet desperation, as when Bill observes that his 20s were all about “hope,” and chasing show business dreams.
His 30s, by contrast, are all about “how dumb it was to hope,” but Gethard says this thesis-y line with a rising inflection, as if he doesn’t quite believe it.
Birbiglia’s film has its facile moments, and the climactic onstage reunion between two of the key characters belongs to a slightly less good movie.
But in this summer of sequels and reboots, “Don’t Think Twice” is a genuinely charming comedy about real people challenging themselves to create new realities for laughs embedded with a little truth.