The Debut Review: Julianne Moore’s Oscar-Ready Triumph

Within moments of starting Jesse Eisenberg’s “The Debut,” one thing is unmistakable: This movie is headed somewhere gloriously unhinged.

Julianne Moore plays Mona, an outwardly timid yet fiercely wound-up New Jersey housewife who auditions for a supporting part in a musical staged by her local community theater. Moore approaches the role with the wild-eyed intensity of someone freshly freed from a straitjacket.

Ordinary small-town theater business, right? Not quite. Mona loses the role to Bernadette Peters.

What sort of supposedly amateur theater group can attract Bernadette Peters? Peters plays Serena Cherry, a local theater star, though her voice suggests someone who has, in fact, collected two Tony Awards.

That wonderfully surreal appearance by Broadway royalty lays down the central principle of Eisenberg’s third feature as writer-director, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival: Rules do not apply here, and neither does much of reality.

At times exhilarating, at others baffling, and consistently absurd, “The Debut” plays like a musical-theater fever dream born from “Waiting for Guffman” and “Black Swan.” It combines insider show-business jokes with a mounting psychological collapse. In other words, it is Weird with a capital W.

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Above all, the film gives Moore — for whom Eisenberg wrote the part — a chance to cut loose. She has built a career on bold, destabilizing performances in films including “May December,” “Savage Grace,” “Boogie Nights” and, yes, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.” Yet she has rarely been as all-in, or as magnificently deranged, as she is in “The Debut.” Her commitment to this frustrated suburban woman at a personal breaking point is so extreme it can inspire concern for the actor herself. It also produces some of Moore’s strongest work in years.

Luckily — or possibly disastrously — for Mona, Serena lands a job in New York City and leaves the production. Mona was, it turns out, the only other person who auditioned. She is subsequently cast as Miss Danielle, the apartment superintendent whose name sounds as though it belongs to a second-grade teacher.

Overseeing “Nosy Neighbors,” the musical at the center of the story, is its terrifying director, Jerry, a perfectionist jerk played by Paul Giamatti. Eisenberg wrote the songs himself, and they flirt knowingly with parody. If Moore’s great gift is playing lunatics, Giamatti’s may be playing assholes.

Mona’s castmates — Stef (Halle Bailey from “Little Mermaid”), Zachary (Colton Ryan) and Trish (Tony Award winner Bonnie Milligan) — revere haughty and pretentious Jerry like a pharaoh, but warn her that he is “going to drag you through the s–t and the mud.”

Indeed, Jerry’s tactic with mousy Mona is to crush her in order to squeeze out a better performance. With totalitarian cruelty, he obsesses over how she delivers a little line: “The rent’s due.”

And in the movie’s most memorable scene, a one-on-one after-hours rehearsal that spins out of control, he pushes her and pushes her until she snaps. To our utter delight. That’s when Jerry — and Mona — realize she’s got it.

Inspired, Mona devotes herself totally to Miss Danielle, like a New Jersey Daniel Day Lewis, shoving aside her husband and son who couldn’t care less what she does outside the home.

By now, Eisenberg’s film is out of its mind. Mona dyes her hair black and gives herself a Liza Minnelli pixie cut. Preferring her artsy new hobby to the monotony of motherhood, she discovers herself at the theater, just as Zac Efron did in “High School Musical,” except Mona coming out of her shell doesn’t move us or make us feel anything at all. This is an outlandish movie that’s more fun than it is deep.

Considering this is Eisenberg’s followup to the heartbreaking “A Real Pain,” that’s a slight bummer. Visually this is miles ahead of his last movie, though. Heightened “Debut” is a very, very slick production.

The whole reason to see it, though, is the spectacular Moore, who’s so batty as Mona you can’t look away, lest you miss the slightest freaky eyelid twitch.

Her fed-up homemaker character might be new to the highs and lows of the actor’s life, but Moore almost certainly has a second Oscar in her future.