And I’m Telling You I'm Not Going
by Andrew Truong

New York Film Festival 2026:
Misty Green
Dir. Chris Rock, U.S., A24

[Warning: Spoilers ahead.]

Those who know Chris Rock primarily for his stand-up comedy may be surprised that his latest directorial effort is being released by A24, whose brand retains an imprimatur of cool despite a pivot to the middlebrow. Unlike most movies made by comedians, he’s not the top-billed star, and though there are a handful of jokes, Misty Green is firmly a drama. A study of Rock’s directing filmography reveals a cinephilic strain. I Think I Love My Wife is an adaptation of Chloe in the Afternoon, one of Éric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. (The morality is largely swapped out for misogyny. More fatally, pre-recession New York just isn’t as stylish as 1970s Paris.) His last movie, 2014’s Top Five, starring Rock as a comedian whose attempt to be taken seriously flops disastrously, is a charming Manhattan walk-and-talk that channels Woody Allen by way of Before Sunrise, even if curdled by a retrograde attitude towards its female characters. A dozen years later, he has taken that film’s scenario not as a cautionary tale but as a personal challenge.

Equally indebted to Magnolia and Dreamgirls, Misty Green strives to be a multi-faceted character study revealing the dark underbelly of Los Angeles, where artistic ambitions run up against financial need. When we first meet Misty Green (Rosalind Eleazar), she’s being kicked out of her Santa Monica condo, which is not really hers. She was seeing a married man who allowed her to live there, but now he’s dead, and his furious widow (Amy Landecker) is ready to sell the apartment. Misty is given a week to move out, and the film largely takes place within these seven days.

Misty is an actress, but at the moment it's more accurate to say that she's unemployed. After winning an Emmy in 2009—for playing “the Black one” on a network television program about flight attendants—she flamed out of the industry, garnering a reputation for on-set clashes and mixing business with pleasure. An exasperated Misty, who is biracial, complains: “I’m too Black to be with Leo, too white to be with Damson,”—the actor best known for playing second fiddle to Brad Pitt in F1 is somehow, in this film’s universe, famous enough to warrant a mononym—“I’m not a nepo baby, I’m not a Brit.” It’s a snappy line, and the way Eleazar, who is British, delivers it comes off as a rehearsed excuse, blaming an industry problem instead of accounting for her own behavior. (Left unsaid, but well understood, is that male actors can get away with being difficult.) She earns a bit of money from recording videos on Cameo and a regular singing gig at the Hollywood Roosevelt, but despite the appearance of success—prolific drug habits, an oft-remarked-upon Birkin bag, that luxury apartment—she’s short on cash.

Pressure keeps on mounting with the re-emergence of Misty’s brother Jay (Daniel Kaluuya), just released from a stint in psychiatric care to treat his bipolar disorder, while her bestie Naomi (Anna Kendrick) copes with a dilemma of love versus lust. Offering temptation is Zach (Adam Driver), a hard-partying friend with benefits who tells Misty that these days, all the action is in Dubai, where she could earn six figures by spending the night with a prince. (Hollywood: Babylon no more.) There’s also a citywide manhunt for the murderer of a USC co-ed; throughout the film we hear reports of police pulling over any man caught driving while Black, and Jay becomes ensnared in this search. (Call it Chekhov’s traffic stop.) This grab bag of social-issue side quests, which makes Misty Green sprawl as much as its setting, cheapens the value of its title character’s hustle: her material goals—fame, a new lease—pale beside the struggles of those around her, relegating Misty to a passenger in what’s supposed to be her own drama.

Rock has worked in entertainment for more than 40 years, and his film is most persuasive when using that experience to examine the mechanics of how celebrity, even at the B-list level, gives Misty protections that others are not afforded. She gets into a car crash, with alcohol, weed, coke, and fentanyl detected in her system. The attending physician doesn’t report this to the police because she grew up watching Misty’s TV show; she instead asks the bruised star for a selfie. Misty is only allowed her seven-day grace period to leave the apartment after the widow realizes who Misty is; she’s also a big fan.

Though mired in a slump, Misty remains confident in her acting abilities, even if oblivious to her diminished standing. After hearing about a Dreamgirls remake in the works, she blithely remarks that “If I’m not Deena,” the ingénue role played by Beyoncé in the 2006 movie, “I’m not doing it.” She doesn’t realize that she's now an Effie (the Jennifer Hudson part), who similarly seeks to resurrect her career. Helming the project is Jordan (Chris Rock), her former director and old fling, who just might be able to offer her the second chance of a lifetime. His anachronistic attire—tilted fedora, waistcoat sans suit jacket—is going for Jamie Foxx in Dreamgirls but comes across as Ne-Yo circa 2008. This is the first time Rock wrote a script that doesn’t feature himself as the lead, though he still can’t help but pull the spotlight towards his character, derailing scenes with a tight 30 seconds of his stand-up shtick. (It’s not unlike Bradley Cooper’s showboating sidekick, a fella named “Balls,” in last year’s Is This Thing On?)

On multiple occasions, someone declares Misty to be a brilliant talent. At the start of a potentially life-changing audition for Dreamgirls, Jordan reassures everyone, “We know Misty can act.” The viewer doesn’t, and we never get to see her fully make use of her powers. This audition scene could have been the prime moment. Misty begins singing a mournful piano arrangement of “One Night Only,” and the camera begins to zoom in on her face. Rock then makes the fatal error of flashing back to events we saw barely an hour ago, not trusting Eleazar to hold our attention when it’s her talent that is never in doubt. Though she’s a veteran of the stage and appeared in various screen projects, it’s her first time leading a movie. Eleazar skillfully navigates Misty’s internal contradictions, adding more depth than what’s on the page. When she steps outside of that audition room into the California sun, she starts dancing, knowing she killed it. It’s a fleeting moment of pure joy, which Eleazar renders as a full-body unburdening.

Misty lands her dream role as Deena (it would have been stronger dramaturgy had she switched to Effie), but the good news comes at the same time her brother has landed in serious legal trouble after a police stop gone wrong. The low pay rate of scale-plus-ten won’t cover what she owes to the lawyer representing Jay, and she’s already pawned off her much-coveted Birkin. Zach’s Dubai offer, once easy to refuse, starts to look like the only sure thing. She skips out on her flight to the Dreamgirls set and hops on a private jet, following her “secure the bag” survival instinct reinforced by L.A. itself: a city of red carpets and homeless encampments, where her borrowed condo affords a view of the Pacific on one side and dumpster divers on the other.

Awaiting Misty in Dubai is a cavalcade of escalating indignities, a superfluous detour in an already overstretched film. Made to wear the stewardess uniform from her old TV show, she is taken to a party where she brawls with women for the cash and Birkin bags thrown into the crowd. The sequence ends with a visit to the prince’s bedroom, the final punishment for her unrepentant hedonism. The specifics of their encounter are mercifully kept off-screen, but Misty’s blank expression on the jet the morning after says enough.

With the same misogynistic streak that plagued his earlier filmography, Rock reduces the film’s two significant female characters to noxious stereotypes, particularly in how their arcs resolve. He makes an earnest effort to paint a portrait of a woman undone by her impulses, but he can’t overcome his own. Naomi weighs her desire for Black men against the financial security her bland white boyfriend can offer, a choice she cements by terminating a pregnancy that resulted from one of her trysts. Misty’s arc, for all its incidents, resolves no differently: only by giving something up does she earn the film’s (and Rock’s) approval. Her decision to trade Deena for Dubai is portrayed as both moral downfall and character growth; it’s the first time Misty puts someone else’s needs before her own, and, tellingly, the only time her choice looks like virtue rather than vice. Agency, for the women in Misty Green, comes with a catch: you can have it if it’s spent on somebody else.

Finally, Rock feels compelled to lighten the mood, veering off into a satirical commercial in which Ice-T pitches luxury tents for the homeless. This coda, two years later, finds Misty teaching fitness classes at an Equinox, still trading on an Emmy she won during Obama’s first term. Jay got a big settlement from his racial profiling suit against the city; the real killer of that USC student, it turns out, was a white guy. By all outward appearances, she’s at peace with being out of the acting game. She got the bag, and the cost was one night only.