Hollywood has always been particularly adept at selling dreams whilst quietly destroying the people trying to live them. In Misty Green, Chris Rock turns that contradiction into something funny, furious and increasingly uncomfortable, crafting a showbusiness satire that isn’t afraid to let its laughter curdle.
Rock’s latest effort as writer-director centres on Misty Green (Rosalind Eleazar), an actress whose career has spectacularly imploded. Once an Emmy winner, her self-destructive behaviour and substance abuse have transformed professional acclaim into industry reluctance, leaving her scrambling for auditions and facing eviction. A possible lifeline arrives through director Jordan (Rock), who is willing to take another chance on her with his upcoming Dreamgirls remake.
Unfortunately, Misty’s problems have never had the decency to arrive one at a time. Her brother (Daniel Kaluuya, who has been so missed from our screens), who lives with bipolar disorder, finds himself in serious trouble, money is rapidly disappearing, and an opportunity presented by a former flame (Adam Driver) promises the type of financial security that would solve almost everything. The catch is that accepting it requires Misty to contemplate just how much of herself she’s prepared to surrender.
It’s fertile territory for Rock, who takes aim at an industry that loves talking about progress whilst remaining remarkably comfortable with the systems that necessitate such conversations in the first place. Race, gender, class and the transactional nature of Hollywood all feed into Misty Green, but Rock rarely treats them as subjects waiting to be neatly unpacked. They instead infect the ecosystem Misty is trying to survive in.
That makes the film particularly effective when questioning where exploitation ends and ambition begins. Misty desperately wants back into an industry that has already demonstrated how disposable it considers her, yet Rock never reduces her to a passive victim of that machinery. She can be selfish, abrasive, impulsive and enormously frustrating. Her tendency to view every setback as further evidence of Misty versus the world frequently prevents her from recognising the damage she creates herself.
Rosalind Eleazar makes every one of those contradictions thrilling.
It’s a tremendous performance, one that feels less like an actor seizing a showcase than completely inhabiting a woman whose armour has become indistinguishable from her personality. Eleazar gives Misty a swagger that can suggest absolute confidence one moment and desperate self-preservation the next. She understands that Misty’s volatility is part of her magnetism; even when the character is making an obviously terrible decision, Eleazar makes us understand the emotional mathematics that got her there. The role represents a striking departure from the parts audiences may immediately associate with her, something Eleazar herself has acknowledged in discussing how hard she fought for the opportunity.
Most importantly, Eleazar never begs for our sympathy. Misty can be exhausting, and the film allows her to be. That refusal to sand away her uglier edges is precisely why we remain invested in her. There’s something enormously compelling about watching a woman who might be her own worst enemy nevertheless refuse to disappear.
Rock surrounds her with actors willing to play within the film’s uglier spaces. Kaluuya brings considerable emotional weight, the sporadic appearances of Anna Kendrick throughout as Misty’s also-not-entirely-employed-as-an-actor bestie with a penchant for men of colour allow the film a sense of much needed feminine support, whilst Driver proves particularly effective at changing the temperature of the movie; whenever he enters Misty’s orbit, Misty Green seems to acquire another layer of grime. The humour becomes less comfortable, the transactions more sinister and the power imbalance harder to ignore. It’s unpleasant by design, and Driver understands exactly how much menace can exist without announcing itself as such.
That tonal instability is both one of the film’s strengths and occasionally its greatest obstacle. Rock can move from acidic comedy to material carrying genuinely disturbing implications with startling speed, and not every transition lands cleanly. There are moments when Misty Green seems caught between wanting us to laugh at Hollywood’s grotesquery and forcing us to confront what that grotesquery actually means for the people subjected to it.
But perhaps complete tonal harmony would be dishonest for a story like this. Rock is depicting an industry capable of turning humiliation into opportunity and exploitation into networking, where something can simultaneously be horrifying and simply another day at work. His willingness to make those contradictions uncomfortable gives the film considerably more bite than a smoother satire might have allowed.
And Rock is fearless in where he directs that bite. Misty Green has plenty to say about Hollywood’s treatment of Black performers and women, but its smartest observations emerge from the intersection of prejudice, economics and desperation. Misty isn’t merely fighting to be seen; she’s trying to determine what being seen is ultimately going to cost her.
For all its cynicism, though, Misty Green never loses sight of the person underneath its industry commentary. Eleazar has described her attraction to finding humanity inside larger-than-life characters, and that instinct is beautifully evident here. Misty may enter rooms like she owns them even when she can barely afford to keep a roof over her head, but beneath that bravado is someone terrified that the dream she built her identity around has already decided it can continue without her.
Rock may be taking a sledgehammer to Hollywood, but Misty Green ultimately belongs to Eleazar. Funny, infuriating, wounded and ferociously alive, she creates the kind of complicated protagonist a safer film would inevitably try to make more palatable.
Thankfully, neither she nor Rock appears particularly interested in playing safe.
FOUR STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Misty Green is screening as part of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, running between September 10th and 20th, 2026. For more information, head to the official site here.
