I tried stand-up, once. Big mistake. I was in my mid-twenties and I could make people laugh in social settings without much trouble, so, I thought, “Maybe I can do that on stage, too.” Turns out, no, I couldn’t do that on stage, too.
Looking back, I had two things working against me: 1) terrible material and 2) an anxiety disorder.
Fast forward twenty-seven years and that brief experience onstage still makes me tremendously respectful of anyone who can stand there, onstage, and make people laugh. Heck, even if they can just stand there, for five to ten minutes, and not get so much as a chuckle, I tip my hat to them.
Nina (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a very pretty, very sexy thirty-something stand-up comedienne who is struggling both on stage and off. She’s a Sarah Silverman-esque, potty mouthed gal who shoots from the hip and shocks audiences with the rawest of material.
Off stage, she’s just as raunchy – drinking and screwing with abandon. Whiskey and gingers are disposed of as frequently as the empty bump and grind of yet another in an endless string of blurry-eyed one night stands.
Finally fed up with her New York life and career going nowhere, Nina departs for the west coast with hopes of appearing on Comedy Prime – a TV stand-up show that promises instant fame.
As I’ve said in previous reviews, if comedy is hard, making a movie about comedy is even harder. Most fail for one basic but obvious reason – the comedy performance scenes aren’t funny. Here, in AAN, we get mixed results.
Winstead does a reasonably good job with her early stand-up scenes, but, as the film moves along, she stumbles. Then, in a key scene, very late in the film, where she has to pull off a series of impressions at a gig that will decide whether she lands that much coveted spot on the ‘Comedy Prime’ TV show, she falls flat. Her impressions are a notch below what you would expect to see from your average comedian with as much experience as her character has in the film.
Thankfully, though, for AAN, the bulk of the movie plays out off stage. Nina arrives in L.A., settles into her agent’s friend’s house, meets a dude and makes a go of it.
That house that she crashes at is owned by Lake (Kate del Catillo) who, at first, comes across as a cookie cutter L.A. spacecake – on Nina’s first night there, she ropes her into a too intense ‘let’s get real’ powwow with her equally out-there friends. Later on, though, when she and her partner, Paula (Clea DuVall) get into a tiff, the two give Nina a gift as they model a rage-free, though awkwardly stilted, way to resolve a small, yet, nagging issue.
A few scenes later, Nina meets a cool operator named Rafe (Common) and, though things get off to a rocky start, they’re soon joined at the hip…and a few other places.
The patient and understanding Rafe is clearly someone Nina needs. He’s sensitive without being a doormat and demands more of her than pretty much every other guy who has shared her bed. Though they have a real chance to make this work, it’s clear that something dark is troubling Nina and it threatens to not only destroy this new found love, but her, as well.
Rafe is Nina’s soft place to fall, if she can ever get out of her own way to see that, but the famous rapper playing him seems a little lost in the role. He’s not bad, but he’s not exactly good, either. He wears the same slightly amused, slightly unsure expression on his face for most of the film. Luckily, the camera likes him and he has a natural charisma that offsets his limited abilities as an actor. Though, they really should’ve looked for someone better. Common doesn’t sink the film, but his one dimensional performance weakens his character’s believability and waters down his scenes with Winstead.
On the other hand, off stage, Winstead is terrific. She nails Nina’s self-destructive, tough-as-nails personality. In fact, she plunges into the role so thoroughly, that you almost wish she was trying to make it as anything other than a stand-up comedian. A high-strung, nervous wreck, quick to strike out at both friend and foe, Winstead drops all disguises and moves us with a raw and deeply felt performance of a very troubled woman.
In the end, as the last moments of AAN fade from the screen, what we’re left with is a film that fails as often as it succeeds. It’s the two-steps-forward-one-step-back of movies. Its drama cuts deep, but its comedy only scratches the surface. Winstead is strong off stage, but weak on.
In a film about a comedy performer, that just isn’t good enough.
