It’s rare these days to find comedy and humanity on the same plate — and even more rare to see comedy nuzzling up to mystery. (I don’t mean mystery as in crime-solving; I mean the mystery of existence.) But Jesse Eisenberg’s “The Debut,” a small-town-theater comedy rooted in big ideas, is a funny and dizzying mind-bender. It’s like “Waiting for Guffman” made by the Coen brothers at their most rivetingly unhinged. “The Debut” won’t be for everyone, but if you get onto its wavelength (which I did immediately), it sucks you into its “Twilight Zone of Ersatz Broadway” vortex, even as the tone remains light and ticklish and surprising.
Eisenberg, as he proved two years ago in the brilliant “A Real Pain,” is a grounded filmmaker (he loves reality). But here he’s working on a high wire of matter-of-fact satire that edges, just barely, into the surreal. Yet it’s still reality-based. At heart, the film is a twisted love letter to the glory of community theater. What holds it together is the suppleness of Eisenberg’s voice as a writer-director (the wit that singes, the story that never stops poking around corners), and the utterly astonishing performance of Julianne Moore, who plays a crumpled wallflower in dire need of blooming. Oh, does she bloom.
