The Debut

Can there be an ethics of the bit part? Mona Friedman (Julianne Moore), a New Jersey housewife who hasn’t sung in public since church choir, is cast as the building super in “Nosy Neighbors,” a local community-theatre musical. Although her role amounts to little more than collecting the rent, she treats it with the gravity others would reserve for Lear. What begins as the portrait of a woman barely allowed to have opinions, told largely through Moore’s vacant, watchful gaze, shifts into a startling metamorphosis. Mona becomes a full-on method actor, clashing with Jerry (Paul Giamatti), a director whose own ambitions curdled long ago. Jesse Eisenberg follows the Oscar-winning A REAL PAIN (2024) with a musical comedy that happily veers into the absurd, writing the songs himself and appearing among the troupe. Beneath the farce, the film takes theatre seriously as a moral space: a place where commitment, rivalry and discipline become forms of care and where strangers become a company. Drawing on Eisenberg’s own adolescence on amateur stages, THE DEBUT pays tribute to the companionship of rehearsal rooms and the dignity of those who perform for no one but each other. For Mona, the smallest role turns out to be the one that finally lets her play herself. (James Lattimer)

Jesse Eisenberg: WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD (2022), A REAL PAIN (2024)