Chris Rock's Misty Green Draws Scathing Verdict at NYFF

Chris Rock's Misty Green, which screened at the 64th New York Film Festival and opens in theaters on October 9, has received one of the year's most hostile reviews, with critic Christian Zilko of The Film Stage calling it "a disaster on all fronts."

The film, written and directed by Rock, stars Rosalind Eleazar as a television actress whose life unravels after the widow of her deceased lover (Amy Landecker) comes to seize the apartment he bought for her. Rock himself plays a hapless director named Jordan Green, a character who shares a name with Misty's mentally ill brother, referred to as Jay — a confusion the review attributes to what it calls Rock's "shocking lack of imagination."

"The longer you watch it, the more it seems to only exist as a platform for writer-director Chris Rock's most hateful impulses," Zilko writes. The review faults the film as a Hollywood satire with no insight, a character study with no character, a drama uninterested in its own stakes, and "a comedy unconcerned with making us laugh."

Eleazar, the review notes, plays Misty "with energy and commitment, but the narrative has no real respect for her as a woman." Her character — an Emmy winner for a supporting role on the fictional Shondaland series Red Eye — is, in the critic's assessment, "a cipher, shepherded from scene to scene by plot mechanisms alone." The review's central charge is that the film exists primarily to punish her: "Going by Rock's script, the most important thing to know about Misty Green is that she lets men down."

Daniel Kaluuya plays Misty's brother Jay, whom the review describes as "a walking plot device," while Anna Kendrick appears as Misty's best friend Naomi. Kendrick, Zilko writes, "makes a meal out of a deeply troubled, darkly funny character." Adam Driver appears as Zach, with whom Misty parties the night before a pivotal audition. The reviewer reserves his sharpest criticism for Rock's own performance as "a scumbag deluded enough to think he's a good guy," which he says "truly dooms the film."

The review also takes issue with the film's treatment of its Hollywood milieu. Misty auditions for the role N'Bushe Wright played in the 1994 crime film Fresh, reading sides the critic identifies as direct quotes from the original script. An old clip shows her reading for Anne Hathaway's role in The Devil Wears Prada, and the film references an ill-fated Cinderella reboot and a Shaft credit. The role Misty chases most, Deena in a Dreamgirls reboot last played by Beyoncé in the 2006 film, strikes the critic as implausible for a television actress of her standing. "If this suggests nitpicking, the laziness is distracting," he writes.

According to the review, the film also shows no interest in the position of Black women in Hollywood, "handwaving sexism and racism as if they're both beside the point." It describes Misty Green as "a woman's story told entirely in a man's voice, and that voice seems to hate her on a level that feels intensely personal and perverse."

The verdict is blunt: "There is no good here. Misty Green is a black hole." Whether the film finds defenders among audiences when it reaches theaters on October 9, or whether the festival screening sets the tone for its reception, remains the open question of its release.