A Star Is Born in Chris Rock’s Burn-It-Down Hollywood Satire

Courtesy of TIFF Everyone in Hollywood is selling themselves in Misty Green , including its protagonist, a once-successful actress whose Emmy Award-winning days are receding fast in the rearview mirror.

The subject of Chris Rock’s fourth directorial effort, however, is really selling herself short, and though his character study/industry satire is a sporadically scattershot venture, it proves a breakout showcase for Rosalind Eleazar ( Slow Horses ), whose multi-layered lead performance makes it so you can’t look away.

The City of Angels’ homeless denizens and tent cities serve as an apt backdrop for Misty Green (screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and in theaters Oct.

9), which portrays the metropolis as a place where desperation and failure are always a hair’s breadth away.

For Misty Green (Eleazar, 38), disaster comes knocking—or, rather, bursting through the door—on another hungover morning via Celine (Amy Landecker, 56), who’s none too pleased to find the star in her recently deceased husband’s oceanfront apartment.

Celine slanders Misty as a sugar baby and yet, upon recognizing her, pauses her tirade to read lines with her—the first of several sharp moments that italicize Los Angelinos’ knee-jerk attraction to celebrity.

Misty’s renown, however, isn’t enough to prevent the woman from giving her seven days to vacate the premises.

This is a problem for Misty, since she has nowhere to go and no meaningful job prospects, the result of having earned a reputation for being a big-time pain in the you-know-what.

Her tenure on a show called Red Eye continues to be her calling card, but her ability to dine out on it is fading, and the look of anger, frustration, and terror in her eyes comes from her awareness that, in Hollywood, growing older—and further away from one’s prime—is a death knell.

Thus, when a young actress at an audition asks for a selfie because, when she was growing up, Red Eye was her mom’s favorite show, it’s less a flattering request than a warning that lands like a punch to the gut.

Misty has a confidence that borders on cockiness, and during a conversation with her best friend Naomi (Anna Kendrick), her defiant refusal to work with numerous colleagues speaks to her self-destructive hard-headedness.

She’s obviously someone who’s known around town as “difficult,” and as it turns out, that’s with good reason.

Tasked by her agent Randy (Topher Grace) to stay at home one evening to memorize lines for the next day’s audition, she instead goes out with Zach (Adam Driver), a slick-haired, goateed lothario with whom, in a club bathroom, she shares cocaine and carnal knowledge.