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If you're a hard-working improv troupe in Manhattan, having your home theater sold out from under you is basically a death sentence for your career. Unless you can throw a successful Hail Mary and get a job on Saturday Night Live.
In Don't Think Twice, the first feature film from comedian Mike Birbiglia, members of a comedy troupe yearn to get on Weekend Live, a thinly veiled SNL surrogate. It might me their big break, and this film might be Birbiglia's.
A movie about a struggling improv troupe may seem an odd choice for one of the summer's best bets—it's been a dry season outside the few expected blockbusters (page 46)—but Don't Think Twice has already been called Birbiglia's Annie Hall, and with the help of Keegan-Michael Key and Gillian Jacobs, this movie brings together a group of talent on the verge of superstardom.
In the film, Birbiglia plays a improv comedy teacher with a receding hairline and predilection for boning his young students. He definitely didn't commit the sin of writing himself as the star.
For the star role, Birbiglia enlisted Key, whose reputation has grown with his brilliant comedy on Key & Peele and his speech at the 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner, where he told a room full of dweeb journalists to "hold onto your lily-white butts."
While Key's virtuosic comedic talent is fully on display, we also get one of our first looks at his dramatic chops, which are substantial. In particular, his chemistry with onscreen love interest Jacobs shines through even as the troupe falls apart.
Jacobs has established herself as one of the major young talents of the small screen with her roles on Community, Love and Girls. Whether or not a relatively small-release indie movie is what will launch her to the next level of work on the silver screen is hard to say, but giving a solid performance opposite Key definitely isn't hurting her chances.
Birbiglia says the film isn't autobiographical, and that, unlike the characters in the movie, he's unlikely ever to be on SNL.
"I've operated at such a low level of show business for so long that I was never even considered [for SNL]," he says. But now, after decades of work in improv, in standup and off Broadway, it looks like things might come together for Birbiglia.
Show biz ain't always fair, except when it is.
Critic's Grade: A-
SEE IT: Don't Think Twice is rated R. It opens Thursday at Cinema 21, with Mike Birbiglia in attendance. Through Aug. 11. Premiere sold out.
Willamette Week