Chris Rock has been on a tear — a widely shared interview with Frank Rich in New York Magazine, a widely shared guest column in The Hollywood Reporter, interviews with Audie Cornish on All Things Considered, Terry Gross on Fresh Air and Jesse Thorn on Bullseye. And those are just a few of the many conversations he’s had surrounding the release of his new film, Top Five, which he wrote and directed.
In a lot of those discussions, Rock has had a lot to say about race in Hollywood, race in general, the atmosphere surrounding comedy, the intersection of some of these things with gender and class, and a whole lot of other pretty provocative things. So it might be that I went into the film primed to be more interested in what it had to say about the industry than in its central love story.
Top Five follows a comic movie star, Andre Allen (Rock), as he spends a day being interviewed by Chelsea, a beautiful reporter from The New York Times, played by Rosario Dawson. Early on, they have a fascinating and tense relationship, marked by distrust and the blend of false and real intimacy that develops as she interviews him for her story. Allen is about to marry a Bravo reality star (Gabrielle Union) in a splashy, highly publicized event, and he’s simultaneously promoting his first serious film, a drama about a slave rebellion.
The best parts of the film lie in its industry satire: its portrayal of the terrible rote interviews that take place at junkets, its sharp eye for the bad questions asked by lazy entertainment reporters, and little details like the satellite radio engineer — played by straight-up genius Brian Regan — who tries to goad Allen into being more painfully wacky while doing station promos. Rock is great at giving Andre’s frustration a genuinely pained edge, alternately funny and not, and that comes both from his performance and from his careful maintenance, as the director, of the balance in the film’s tone between goofy comedy and a comedic presentation of some of the same observed and thoughtful criticism he’s been offering in the press in recent weeks.