The Debut is going to win an Oscar

Every year, there are Oscar-bait films: stories designed to play on the emotions and sentimentalities of a voting body that seem to care more about how artistic a movie feels than actually is. And every year, audiences turn against them as contrived, out of touch and desperate.

Which you'd think could bode poorly for Julianne Moore, star of writer-director Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut — at least when it comes to how regular audiences might feel about a performance best described as "psychotically genius."

Because on its face, the chaotic, carnivalesque community theatre parable presents with all the risk factors: entertainment about the world of entertainment, absurdist high-minded comedy that feels straight out of a New Yorker cartoon, and a main character that reads like a cross between Patti LuPone in Evita and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker .

In short, it's the kind of thing that might feel designed in a lab to win an Oscar — and therefore, come off as annoyingly self-important to actual audiences when they get to see it. But on that front, there are two bits of good news for The Debut . The first is that this thing is almost definitely going to nab that Oscar. And the second is that it won’t do it by being disingenuous.

Because this is quite clearly one of the most shatteringly good movies of the year; a film that blends comedy, horror and drama so effectively it’s impossible to define it as any one genre. And it's a movie that does so by showcasing one of the most incredible, and endearing, acting tour-de-forces of a lifetime.

The Debut is anchored by Moore's stunning, unrestrained performance as Mona — despite, initially, seeming as shallow as it gets. A demure housewife with two near-adult children and emotionally immature husband, Mona apparently hasn’t been given the privilege of developing an interior life. Instead, she seems to have spent the past 50 or so years in the painfully simple, almost fableistic role constructed around her.

She makes dinner for an unappreciative family in a house that looks like it was decorated by a cross between Martha Stewart and Doctor Seuss. She goes to weekly cocktail nights with a couple who don't even pretend to hear her speak. And when she talks, she does so in a quiet, plain, sing-song voice that practically screams "please don’t be mad at me." Not that she has the confidence to scream about anything, to anyone at all.

That is, until she decides to audition for a community theatre production of Nosy Neighbors — a fictional musical about all the zany inhabitants of a seedy apartment building, in which she would play building super Ms. Danielle.

It's an obviously good-spirited takedown of plays in the style of 7 Stories and The Dining Room — the ensemble-based, zany-characters-share-a-single-location-type of stories that tend to clog up community theatre calendars. It's a refreshing specificity only someone familiar with community theatre would know: the perennial struggle to find plays with enough jokes to go around for everyone auditioning.

That is Eisenberg to a tee.