The Musical review

The Musical has a premise that sounds more interesting when you describe it than it actually was watching the movie. Will Brill plays Doug Leibowitz, a frustrated playwright who’s now teaching middle-school theater and has sort of an incel thing going on. He’s bitter, aggrieved and generally convinced that the things going wrong in his life are somebody else’s fault. He’d been dating another teacher, Abigail, played by Gillian Jacobs, but she calls time on the relationship over the summer. When they come back to school, she’s dating Principal Brady, played by Rob Lowe, who is this preternaturally handsome guy everybody seems to like.

Doug does not take this well. He spins out and decides to take his students with him. They’re supposed to be doing West Side Story, but instead Doug writes his own musical about 9/11 and gets a bunch of middle-school kids to perform catchy little songs about September 11. This is apparently how he’s decided to process being dumped and losing his girlfriend to Rob Lowe. He’s basically using the school musical, and by extension the children, as part of his personal breakdown.

The kids are the heart of the movie. They’re funny, they’re good, and they play off Brill well. My problem is Doug. He’s not sympathetic, and I don’t think he’s interesting enough for me to enjoy spending this much time watching him spiral. He’s psychologically and emotionally screwing with these kids, not in a “somebody call the police” way, but definitely in a “somebody needs to forcibly remove this man from his position” kind of way.

And I get what they’re going for. What if a bitter, depressed middle-school teacher gets dumped, goes rogue and makes a bunch of children perform a musical about 9/11? That’s funny as a premise. Everything is intentionally provocative without ever becoming particularly offensive. The problem is that the movie isn’t funny enough to make the premise work for an entire movie, and it isn’t dark or substantive enough to make Doug’s behavior particularly interesting. So it ends up stuck somewhere in the middle. I understood the joke. I just wasn’t laughing enough.

The whole thing kept making me think about Win Win and The Holdovers. Paul Giamatti has basically played better versions of this general character more than once, the unhappy guy in a dark place who develops this strange relationship with the kids around him. Honestly, put Giamatti in this movie as the bitter teacher whose girlfriend leaves him for Rob Lowe and I think you’ve already made The Musical better. He has the personality and sense of humor to make somebody like Doug funny while still making him feel like an actual person.

I didn’t hate The Musical. It wasn’t bad. I just wasn’t that interested in it. That’s almost worse for a movie built around a premise this ridiculous. If you’re going to give me a middle-school 9/11 musical created by a teacher having a breakdown because his girlfriend left him for Rob Lowe, I should have considerably more to say about it afterward.

Wait for streaming. Or go watch Win Win or The Holdovers. They’re better versions of the kind of movie I wanted this to become.