Rebecca Keagan of NBC News moderated the Q&A with Eisenberg, Moore and Giamatti. It was Giamatti’s first time seeing the film.
Call it Eisenberg’s “Black Swan” by way of “Whiplash” and “Waiting for Guffman,” the whole fever dream staged inside a faux musical and relocated to a New Jersey rec center. Moore plays Mona Friedman, a meek housewife who hasn’t sung in front of anyone since church choir and is unexpectedly cast in a community-theater production — then transforms into a zealous method actor willing to wage war over a marginal role. Giamatti is Jerry, the tyrannical director billed, without irony, as the biggest name in New Jersey community theater. It is funny, then feral, then unexpectedly moving and it confirms that the filmmaker who won Kieran Culkin an Oscar with “A Real Pain” knows exactly how to build a showcase around actors.
There is something lovely, too, in the pairing of this and “Elsinore” on the same mountain: the two biggest swings at Telluride this year are both love letters to acting itself.
“The Debut” is less a musical than a savage comedy about one — a movie set in the world of an original show rather than a wall-to-wall songbook. That distinction matters.
