'Misty Green' squanders its potential

As Chris Rock has made the rounds promoting his first directed feature since Top Five in 2014, he’s openly pondered the meaning of “forgiveness.” It’s an idea that emerges in Misty Green, a shambolic Hollywood-set dramedy about the soul-sucking qualities of an industry known for being highly selective as to whom it doles out redemption.

The title character, played by Rosalind Eleazar, is an actress nearing 40 whose short-lived glory years are behind her, largely because she’s committed what might be the greatest sin in the entertainment business: burning too many bridges (while being a Black woman). We’ll learn dribs and drabs about her many transgressions, which include assaulting a crew member, showing up to auditions while very obviously coked up, and sleeping with other people’s husbands.

Exploring what accountability and grace could look like for a messy-as-hell Black woman is a great premise. That potential is squandered by Rock’s well-worn sensibilities, and the decision to cast himself as the film’s second lead.

Misty Green opens at a nadir — Misty’s work has dried up because of her sordid reputation, and her dead sugar daddy’s widow has given her one week to leave the beachfront condo she’s been squatting in. Her options for crawling out of casting purgatory are limited: She can swallow her pride and try to kill it at an audition for an embarrassingly stereotypical “hood” character. Or, she can try to convince Jordan Green (Rock), a work-for-hire filmmaker also in a career downswing, to let her read for the part of Deena in a Dreamgirls remake he’s directing. She and Jordan have history; he knows she’s talented, but years ago he was the one who had to fire her for that assault on set.

Many things threaten Misty’s road to redemption: Zach (an effectively sleazy Adam Driver), a middling filmmaker and bad influence whose primary gig is hard partying and flying women out to entertain royals in places like Dubai; her brother Jay (Daniel Kaluuya), who’s having trouble managing his bipolar disorder; and, of course, herself.

Misty Green is as unruly as its lead, much to its detriment. Misty’s misadventures are rendered through scenes that meander for too long, end abruptly, or just spin out into incoherence. (Rock’s erratic treatment of Jay’s mental illness — Kaluuya does his best with it — clumsily dovetails with a subplot concerning the racial profiling of Black men.)

More pressingly, Misty herself is an enigma. Given who the creator is, this doesn’t come as a total surprise: Discomfort with women has long been a fixture of Rock's observational humor — among other things, in his eyes, they are gold diggers, emotionally needy, “doomed” to become sex workers without proper parenting, and culturally overvalued as mothers while dads are ignored. (In Bigger & Blacker: “Women want every [expletive] thing!” In Never Scared: Rock says his “only job in life” is to keep his daughter “off the pole.”) Even in Good Hair, his attempt at unpacking his young daughter’s internalization of a phrase rooted in racism and colorism, Rock ends up pathologizing Black women’s beauty habits and chastising them for being fiscally irresponsible. (Much of that documentary focuses on the multibillion-dollar weave/wig industry.)

His overreliance on gendered binaries carries over into Misty Green. Rock’s acting performances have historically been serviceable at best, and his role as Jordan barely separates him from his standup persona: the character is a moralizing savior who observes Misty’s hubris and chaos with a combination of revulsion, pity and allurement. (Re-watching some of Rock’s specials really hammers home his tendency for contemptuous, Cosby-like finger-wagging, which was embraced uncritically by many audiences of the 1990s and 2000s, myself included.) With one exception, Misty’s inner circle barely exists — a comment upon the vapidity and emptiness of Hollywood and Los Angeles — and so Jordan is the only voice of reason in her life, if only she’d listen to him long enough to stop getting in her own way.

As a writer, Rock doesn’t seem to like or respect Misty, the character he created — that is, he’s not all that interested in probing how her self-destructive tendencies and the often-transactional nature of the industry feed into one another, and he struggles to imagine her interiority, interests and desires.

He gestures at the cards stacked against Black actresses in Hollywood — Misty laments she’s usually either “too black” or “not Black enough” for certain roles, and she can’t make up for that by being a nepo baby or a Brit. (Worth noting, maybe: Eleazar is, in fact, a Brit.) But this alone isn’t enough to hang a character study on, no matter how hard Eleazar works to fill in Rock’s gaps through a torrid performance. Misty Green inadvertently finds itself in the not-uncommon position of reiterating the issue it’s meant to critique: a movie about the dearth of opportunities for Black actresses provides its star with a half-baked role that’s more avatar than person. This ongoing pattern of talented Black actresses punching leagues above the material they’re given is, frankly, maddening — see Zendaya; Lupita Nyong’o; Teyana Taylor.

Rock has acknowledged some of the films that influenced Misty Green — among them Klute and Bad Lieutenant. A more direct line can be drawn to a pair of underseen films that coincidentally came out 30 years ago, Spike Lee’s Girl 6 (screenplay by Suzan Lori-Parks) and Bridgett M. Davis’s Naked Acts, both about Black women navigating the film industry in the '90s. Girl 6 is a satirical sex comedy about an aspiring actress (the luminous Theresa Randle as Judy) who takes a job as a phone sex operator to pay the bills only to find that it satisfies — to a point — the thrill of performing she hasn’t been able to get from a “real” acting job. And in Naked Acts, which until recently was nearly impossible to view, aspiring actress Cicely (Jake-Ann Jones, striking) is cast in an independent film that requires a nude scene; it forces her to confront her insecurities, as well as a fraught relationship with her mother, a former Blaxploitation star in the vein of Pam Grier.

Girl 6 and Naked Acts achieve a few things Misty Green does not — notably, they deem their respective protagonists’ quests for artistic and personal fulfillment utterly fascinating and worthy of exploration. They directly engage with the history of Black women in Hollywood — with references to Carmen Jones, Foxy Brown, etc. — but both also tell a story that’s informed and shaped by that history.

Judy and Cicely are in conversation with Misty’s journey. Notably, Misty has tasted some of the fruits of non-linear progression — she’s “made it” into the industry and won an Emmy for being on a hit TV show, mirroring the last three decades of intermittent, unprecedented successes for Black women in Hollywood. She’s screwed it up of her own accord, though, presenting a perfect opening to wrestle with the precariousness of all those symbolic gains and marry it with the malleable concept of forgiveness Rock presents here. But no dice; the film is too untethered and sanctimonious to satisfyingly connect those dots, emotionally or narratively.