Misty Green is a film I find immensely frustrating because you can see the immense amount of potential on display. There are very few films about life in Hollywood from the perspective of a Black woman, much less one that is as complicated as Misty. Despite an extremely talented cast on hand, writer-director Chris Rock’s new dramedy is one of the bigger disappointments to come out this year.
The film follows the titular Misty Green (Rosalind Eleazar), an Emmy Award-winning actress whose career is on a major downturn; so much so that in the opening, we find out she’s about to get kicked out of her recently deceased boyfriend’s apartment by his widow. Part of Misty’s struggles are systemic, as the number of roles offered to older Black women in Hollywood are very limited. The other part is self-inflicted, as Misty’s hard partying lifestyle and confrontational temperament have burned many bridges in producers’ eyes.
Given only a week to find a new place, Misty discovers a first step at a potential comeback through a lead role in a Dreamgirls remake. But if she wants the role, she has to reckon with her own self-destructive behaviour, as well as manage relationships with several complicated figures in her life, like her best friend Naomi (Anna Kendrick), her sleazy lover Zach (Adam Driver) and her bipolar/schizophrenic brother Jay (Daniel Kaluuya).
Misty Green marks Chris Rock’s first time back in the writer-and-director’s chair since his very underrated 2014 dramedy Top Five, as well as his first feature where he isn’t the lead. I respect Rock wanting to create a Black female character that isn’t a model minority, one that isn’t immediately perfect or passive. The problem is Misty goes too far in the other direction.
As much as Misty is written to be a difficult character, the film gives us very little good in her to latch on to in spite of that. Every opportunity that’s presented to her, she either sees as beneath her, or she squanders immediately of her own volition, like a moment where she instantly forgoes practicing for an audition the next morning in lieu of a drug-fuelled hookup with Zach. A lot of the salient points the film wants to make–like how stereotypical the roles Misty is offered and how she’s dismissed mid-audition for a younger actress–are undercut by making her as frustrating a person as possible.
Unlike the protagonists of the Safdie brothers’ films, for instance, it feels like the film actively wants you to hate her character by having her go through hell to humble her. You spend most of the movie pitying her rather than empathizing with her. I will give credit to Roslind Eleazar; she injects as much humanity and nuance as she can into a pretty thinly-written role, and she is a very compelling presence on-screen. She makes an absolute meal out of some pretty bad material.
“Misty Green is a film I find immensely frustrating because you can see the immense amount of potential on display.”
Additionally, the film spends a lot of time trying to talk about a lot of different subjects at once, whether that be through Naomi’s fetishization of Black men, LA’s massive economic disparity and a recurring subplot about another white woman’s murder leading to increased racial profiling from police. However, Rock’s screenplay offers surface-level satire in a way that feels shockingly amateurish at times.
He himself also appears on screen as Jordan, the casting director for the aforementioned Dreamgirls reboot who ends up reconnecting with Misty throughout the film. The many scenes between Jordan and Misty–wherein they discuss systemic racism in Hollywood–just end up feeling like slightly updated versions of Rock’s stand-up routines. A scene of him where he jokes about his frequent use of the N-word in fancy restaurants may have been biting in the late 90s, but in 2026, it just feels stale.
Even worse than his observations on Hollywood misogynoir are the few moments where the film tries to tackle how society mistreats the mentally disabled. Just like Eleazar, Daniel Kaluuya does the best he can with bad material, albeit with extremely limited screen time. However, his character only seemingly exists to be an additional burden for Misty to bear. At one point, the film has an in-universe PSA that goes along the lines of a generic “We have to do more about mental health” in a way that I just found insulting.
Misty Green is not completely without merit. Despite the weak script, there are still a few solid laughs, including a great Ice-T cameo. The rest of the supporting cast deliver solid performances, with Adam Driver’s sleazeball turn being pretty memorable and Anna Kendrick being hilarious the few times she appears. However well-intentioned Chris Rock was in making Misty Green, I ultimately feel like he was the wrong person to tell this type of story.
