A Star Is Reborn: Julianne Moore Powers Jesse Eisenberg’s Latest With Peanuts & Monkey Blood
Dreams of stardom can strike like lightning at any time. It’s not just a curse reserved for the young and naive. In Jesse Eisenberg’s mashup of The Simpsons episode “A Streetcar Named Marge” and Christopher Guest’s Waiting For Guffman, a middle-aged housewife suddenly becomes starry-eyed and stage bound. But The Debut, led by a full-tilt performance by Julianne Moore, can never quite decide if it’s on the side of its daydreamers or mocking them from afar.
In a podunk town in New Jersey, Mona Friedman’s (Moore) utility in her family has dried up. Her twin teenagers are getting ready to graduate high-school and no longer need her to ferry them around town. She might as well be invisible to her husband who sees her as little more than the maker and provider of meals. Before you can say “empty nest syndrome,” Mona decides to audition for a role in her local theater production of the musical Nosy Neighbors. Mona has never acted before, and she certainly can’t sing, but she’s got nothing to lose. However, she’s never met the likes of Jerry (Paul Giamatti), the director, who commands every aspect of the show as if he were preparing for a months-long run in London’s West End instead of just three nights in the middle of nowhere. At first, Mona unsurprisingly doesn’t get a callback, but when local legend Serena Cherry (Bernadette Peters) drops out at the last minute, she gets the break she was looking for — mostly because no one else tried out for the part.
Genuinely supported by her castmates, Mona’s biggest challenge is meeting Jerry’s demands and rising to his standards. Working with unshaped clay, Jerry sees only one way to get Mona to stop asking silly questions, missing her marks, and give the performance Nosy Neighbors requires: breaking her down and building her back up. This is illustrated in the film’s central and bravura sequence in which Jerry and Mona work one-on-one to find her character of a plucky apartment superintendent. But Jerry almost does too good of a job, as the newly empowered Mona takes ownership of the role to the extent it nearly tears apart the entire production. Meanwhile, her confidence manifests offstage as well, as Mona moves out of her house and into a dumpy motel room in the leadup to the first night. There, in one of the film’s more uneven sections, Mona survives on peanuts and a drink called monkey blood (I don’t know either), while clandestinely fixing her room’s plumbing all in preparation for the play.
Moore matches Mona’s gumption, driving the film with a performance that is all raw vulnerability and fearlessness; it will undoubtedly be another legacy definitely role. It’s just a shame the film Eisenberg builds around her, as writer and director, is less certain. Where The Simpson’s episode and Guest’s film were anchored by a genuine empathy for its characters, The Debut often comes across as condescending toward the modest aspirations of small town actors. The aforementioned television show and movie also adroitly situated its stories in the larger context of its surrounding. We not only knew what the stakes were for their respective productions and characters, but how they echoed amongst friends, family, and citizens.
As for Mona herself, Eisenberg never quite settles on if she’s an object of pity or derision. Even as the film builds toward her inevitable triumph, the writer and director can’t seem to help kicking her when she’s down. For example, when we learn that when she was growing up Mona’s parents took her fancy restaurants, only to leave her outside like a dog, it’s played for a big laugh instead of sympathizing with a woman who has been neglected her entire life. And while the film seems to construct parallels between a toxic marriage and the actor/director relationship, it doesn’t do much with it.
The effervescent Mona asserts to the rest of her castmates that while they might see themselves as outcasts, she feels like an “incast” among them. But The Debut struggles to really make that felt. Mona, like everyone else in the movie, is an affectation or an idea for Eisenberg to play with, not a person he feels particularly compelled to understand.
Reviewed on September 13th at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival (51st edition) – Special Presentations. 105 Minutes.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
