“[Bradley] Cooper has a thing for marriage stories,” the film critic Justin Chang recently wrote in The New Yorker. He’s not wrong. First, there was the actor’s directorial debut with A Star Is Born (2018), the fourth remake of a Hollywood classic about a star on the rise and a star in free fall. Five years later came Maestro, Cooper’s portrait of Leonard Bernstein, as seen through his marriage to Felicia Montealegre. In both films, Cooper played the male lead—a pattern he breaks with his third feature, Is This Thing On? The story of a divorce, albeit a friendly one, it stars Laura Dern and Will Arnett as a couple separating after more than 20 years together. Dern plays a retired Olympic volleyball player reckoning with the sacrifices she made for her family, while Arnett’s character, who works in finance, stumbles into stand-up comedy after an impromptu late-night set. Cooper appears as Balls, best friend to Arnett’s character. The movie is lighter and more cheerful than Cooper’s previous projects, but according to Chang, it’s “enormously affecting.” —Adrian Horton