Final Rating: 2/5
Directed by Chris Rock, Misty Green stars Rosalind Eleazar as an actress struggling to find parts several years after winning an Emmy for her TV show “Red Eye.” She’s spent the years since her career peak being disagreeable on set after set, sleeping around, and abusing drugs. When a former lover dies, she keeps living in his apartment until his widow barges in, demanding she leave immediately, forcing Misty to either mend fences or end up on the street.
Eleazar plays Misty as talented, but prickly and entitled. Her past successes, combined with years of slacking off, have eroded her work ethic such that she refuses to learn her lines, if she even shows up to auditions at all. She’s most alive while partying, but even then is so clearly frustrated by her inability to land a job that she comes out the other end exhausted and bitter.
Her remaining friends are people she hasn’t pushed away yet – only one of them, Naomi (Anna Kendrick) even likes her. The reason she hasn’t pushed them away? Mostly because they won’t cut her off if she continues to disappoint them.
Rock’s story is, on its face, a character study of an aging black woman trying to make it in an industry where each of those is a dirty word. A woman who, at the same time, has to deal with a lifetime of poor decisions coming back to haunt her.
It’s a movie with a lot of irons in the fire. Misty Green touches on misogyny, anti-blackness, and abuse in the film industry. It also touches on society’s lack of mental health resources, and drug abuse among rich people and celebrities. There’s a sequence in Dubai that briefly shows abuse perpetrated by world leaders, turning one character into a Bonafide socialite a la Jeffrey Epstein.
What Misty Green doesn’t do is commit to any of those ideas. Rock’s vision of celebrity culture is certainly messed up, but shallowly so. Misty experiences racism, misogyny, and abuse, but it all feels hollow. A call to an audition leads to Misty celebrating with a drug-fueled night of partying. That obviously doesn’t help her the next day, but the cure for the disappointment of a bad audition is another drug-fueled night of partying.
Only in the presence of her brother Jordan (Daniel Kaluuya) does Misty experience real growth. Jordan is bipolar, recently released from prison and struggling to reintegrate into society. Even on his meds, he’s short-fused, and has no tolerance for even a hint of prejudice.
During a scene at a dinner with friends, a waiter placing the cheque in front of someone else is interpreted by Jordan as a slight against him because he’s poor. When angered, Jordan is quick to make a scene, heavily overreacting even when his concerns are justified. He also has a penchant for pranks – for example throwing a plastic spider at people – which does not pair well with his mood swings.
In a film centred around sexism and racism in Hollywood, it’s telling that the most sympathetic character is Jordan, a character who deals directly with neither. Jordan’s mental health struggles are rightfully portrayed as being beyond his control; his tragedy is that bipolar disorder damns him from the start.
Misty is different. She directly suffers ostracization from her peers, but it’s framed as her fault. She faces more barriers than young, white actresses, but her auditions go poorly because she’s lazy. Her rare opportunities are squandered by her. Misty’s destiny is absolutely within her control.
Misty Green gestures towards holding a mirror to Hollywood but is ultimately more revealing of the filmmakers’ blindspots. Rock is plenty knowledgeable about racism, and how discriminatory systems lead to society’s most vulnerable never getting a fair shot even in the City of Angels. His handling of Jordan demonstrates this, not to mention his previous documentary work tackling racism. He’s less able to show what those rigged systems look like within Hollywood.
There’s a powerful critique of showbusiness in a movie where Misty succeeds in a rigged system or is ultimately defeated by it. If Misty fails because she has a bad work ethic… that’s less interesting.
Misty Green was seen during the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.
