“Your twenties are all about hope. And your thirties are all about how dumb it was to hope.”
Improvisational comedy didn’t really take off until the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, but it’s still baffling that a movie like Don’t Think Twice hasn’t already been made. In a way, it feels like an instant classic. Part Woody Allen, part Robert Altman and part The Big Chill, writer-director Mike Birbiglia has made a near-perfect movie.
The film focuses on a six-person improv-comedy group called The Commune with a steady tenure in New York City. Each of the troupe’s performers — especially Keegan-Michael Key (Key and Peele), Chris Gethard and Kate Micucci (Garfunkel and Oates) — are written with brilliant, idiosyncratic nuance and play off one another with a homey comfort.
When their theatre is about to close in a few weeks and one of the performers is offered a role on Weekend Live (a pitch-perfect SNL pastiche), the group’s unity and security is dismantled. Pride for their friend’s accomplishment is traded for the more realistic reactions: jealousy, self-doubt and manic hubris. Birbiglia’s bittersweet screenplay handles these explicit adult problems with a humane consideration and sincerity. It’s disquieting to see their relationship fracture.
Birbiglia plays Miles, an improv teacher in the group who insists that he was once “inches” away from getting a spot on Weekend Live, a repeated sentiment that only adds a grim irony to his namesake. When the group assembles to watch Weekend Live (a tradition among them), he remarks with nerdy reverence that it’s the “sporting event” equivalent for comedy.
The film is chock-full of jokes, many of which are more charming than laugh-out-loud funny. It has wisecracks that deliberately fall flat, improv bits that flop and off-base one-liners traded between the friends, the kind that would offend anyone not used to the bruising, spontaneous nature of the art form.
Birbiglia’s last movie was Sleepwalk With Me, about his concurrent real-life battle with sleep apnea, marriage anxiety and his blossoming career as a road comic. Don’t Think Twice, although not as autobiographical as Sleepwalk, shares many of the same qualities, but Don’t Think Twice is more adult, more fully visualized and overall a more successful film.
Samantha, played by Gillian Jacobs, is impeccable as the movie’s emotional heart. Her performance adds a vulnerability to the narrative. While everyone is watching Weekend Live, they each voice their disbelief when their former troupe member pops up during the opening montage. But Samantha remains silent, her face slipping into reluctant bemusement as she fully processes seeing her colleague, a heartbreaking manifestation of success, parading across her TV.
The movie is a candid look at how adults attempt to cope with witnessing a close friend living their dream, while simultaneously realizing it may be time to stop playing make-believe.