IS THIS THING ON?

Here's the tension in this one: the movie is genuinely good, and the movie is genuinely too much. Alex, a fortysomething accountant whose wife has decided to divorce him, stumbles into stand-up comedy and finds that talking about his pain onstage makes him a better, more present husband and father offstage. That's a story worth telling — funny, often touching, with superb performances and a feel-good ending that actually believes marriages can be rebuilt.

But the vehicle carrying that message is loaded with excessive foul language and strong lewd humor, enough that even a review sympathetic to the film's heart calls it "excessive and ultimately unacceptable." Ninety-six obscenities, most of them "f" words, plus repeated crude sexual jokes, don't leave much room for anyone trying to protect their conscience or their household from an evening of that.

A good story doesn't redeem a script this saturated with profanity. Skip it — and look for a comeback story that doesn't ask you to wade through this much crudeness to find it.

Alex is a fortysomething accountant whose wife, Tess, has decided to divorce him. One lonely night after dropping off their kids, a friend talks him into an open-mike slot at a comedy club just to dodge the cover charge. Alex starts talking about his divorce — and gets real laughs.

He keeps coming back. And somehow, the laughs start changing him into someone more present, more caring. Tess notices. Whether that's enough to bring them back together — and what happens if she learns why he's changed — is where the story goes from here.

Three stars means this is a well-made film, and the source backs that up: the performances are called superb, the comedy genuinely funny, the emotional beats often touching, and the ending feel-good rather than cynical. It also lands a rare thing for a movie about divorce — a real, stated belief that marriages heading toward the end can still turn around.

The same review that praises all this is blunt about what undoes it: the craft is strong, but the script leans on excessive, frequently strong foul language and lewd humor to get its laughs, and that choice — not any failure of direction or performance — is what keeps a well-made movie from being a recommendable one.

At its center, this film believes something Scripture believes: that honesty can heal what silence and detachment break. Alex's stand-up routine works like confession — he says out loud what he's been avoiding, and naming his pain makes him more attentive to his wife and sons. The film even threads in an instrumental of "Amazing Grace" and a passing line about an actor having once played the Apostle John, small gestures toward a moral frame larger than the joke of the week. The worldview here is light, moral, pro-family, and quietly redemptive: a marriage worth saving, children who matter to their father throughout, a story that refuses to treat divorce as the only ending available.

That frame has limits. The characters inhabit a generally pagan world, and a same-sex male couple appears among the side characters, presented without comment as simply part of the social landscape the film takes for granted. We note that once, as a fact about the film's moral universe, not as a verdict on anyone in it.

The film's real subject — a man who finally tells the truth about his pain and finds his marriage restored because of it — echoes something the Bible says plainly: "Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed" (James 5:16). The longing this movie gets right is real. The way it gets there is not one you should hand your family.

There's a good movie tucked inside this one — a story about confession, honesty, and a marriage worth saving. But the same review that praises its performances and its feel-good ending is honest that the language and lewd humor make it excessive and ultimately unacceptable. Our answer stays the same: skip it. For a family movie night that won't cost you your conscience, start here:.