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Rent’s due.
Once you hear that line in Jesse Eisenberg’s “The Debut” — and Julianne Moore‘s specific intonation of it, especially in a Joan-Jett-meets-electrocuted-Liza-Minnelli wig — the words rent’s due will be branded on your brain. (And for gay men who love musical theater and love Moore, it’s a fever dream.) In the riotously funny musical theater comedy, which scored great reviews out of Telluride and Toronto and New York, Julianne Moore plays Mona, a rookie community theater actress in too deep over a very small role of “Miss Danielle,” a hardened Manhattan building super. In other words, it’s Julianne Moore going full Julianne Moore and it’s a peak Moore performance. Watch the latest trailer for the film below.
As I wrote out of the New York Film Festival, take Moore’s “don’t you call me lady” “Magnolia” meltdown monologue and grotesquely distort it into an onstage breakdown in a delightfully bonkers show business comedy, and you’ll have some idea of the famed mid-scene applause moment out of “The Debut.” It’s been practically mythologized online since the film’s Telluride premiere, but that doesn’t spoil the exhilarating pleasure of watching it happen.
In Jesse Eisenberg’s third feature (and his first about a musical, and featuring original songs he wrote), Moore plays an unassuming New Jersey housewife who auditions for a community theater play directed by Paul Giamatti. Mona soon takes the role too far, losing herself in the process and imposing changes on the script that blur fiction and reality. While the Venn diagram between Julianne Moore gays and musical theater gays will devour this excruciatingly funny movie, there’s plenty of humanity and heart to push it into the realm of the universal. (Eisenberg also wrote the songs for the musical within the movie, by the way, titled “Nosy Neighbors.”)
Read IndieWire’s recent interview with Julianne Moore here. The film could deliver Moore her second Oscar statue after “Still Alice.”
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