‘The Musical’ Review: A Darkly Comic ‘School of Rock’ for the Era of Stephen Miller

Upon learning that his ex-girlfriend and still co-worker (Gillian Jacobs) has gotten together with their preening boss (Rob Lowe), a a resentful middle school teacher named Doug (Will Brill) decides to kamikaze the principal’s reputation by secretly preparing his prepubescent cast to stage an original musical about 9/11 under the guise of performing “West Side Story” (which in itself is pretty risqué material for kids that age). So goes the premise of Giselle Bonilla’s darkly comic and occasionally funny “The Musical,” which marries the entitled peevishness of “Election” to the we’re putting on a show without telling our parents anarchy of “School of Rock.” The result is a dated mishmash that makes a credible but halfhearted bid for relevance by triple-underlining the common theme of the much better movies that inspired it: White male bitterness is the most blithely destructive force on Earth. 

In that light, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Bonilla’s protagonist has been styled to bear a passing resemblance to Stephen Miller (which, based on the strength of the “Stereophonic” Tony-winner’s screen work so far, is almost certain to be the cruelest thing I will ever have reason to write about Mr. Brill). An entitled Wesleyan grad who’s still pissed that he had to settle for a teaching job after his career as a playwright blew up on the runway, Doug likes to think of himself as the jilted star of a low-stakes neo-noir; indeed, his self-pitying narration (“I bet Eugene O’Neill never had to work at a middle school”) is accompanied by enough brassy saxophone to make anyone think of fellow teacher Abigail as a deadly femme fatale. 

In reality, Abigail seems like a normal person who probably just got sick of dating a disillusioned weasel, but it doesn’t really matter to Alexander Heller’s poison-tipped script, which only affords Abigail whatever dimension Doug is willing to give her (not much). Further complicating matters is the fact that her new beau, Principal Brady, is objectively punchable enough to inflame Doug’s rage. A grabby 61-year-old with a shit-eating smile, a giant Stanley mug, and an unctuous gift for self-preservation that makes him seem more interested in appeasing the liberal sensibilities of Cedarhurst’s parents than in educating their children, Principal Brady is the perfect kind of awful to help Doug justify being even worse. Doug doesn’t harbor any delusions that taking his boss down will inspire Abigail to realize the error of her ways, but there’s no doubt that he thinks of himself as the hero of this story. 

The full extent of his martyrdom is hard to measure over the course of a movie that barely engages with anything beyond its own bile. Doug seems to think of his students as a means to an end, and he never misses a chance to poison their minds by repackaging his frustrations as teachable moments (“The thing about life,” he tells a Latina student who’s mad that a white girl is cast as Maria, “is that sometimes you win, but sometimes you have to watch your enemy steal what could have been yours”). But there’s nothing to suggest that Doug ever starts to appreciate his influence over them, and the kids’ eventual pivot towards “Dead Poets Society”-level adoration for him isn’t sharp enough to sell itself on irreverence alone. 

Bonilla has a strong grasp on the film’s many-splendored tone, and — in the midst of a Sundance whose narrative movies have been sorely lacking in formal creativity — it rocks to see a young American director even try to maintain such a tricky balancing act with their debut feature. The bits that hit are well-supported (e.g. Doug brainwashing his students onto his side by showing them “The Manchurian Candidate” on the old TV he rolls into class), and the ones that don’t are so elegantly suffused into the movie’s cockeyed atmosphere that they tend not to leave any dead air in their wake. 

Most of all, the musical itself — dubbed “Heroes” — is undeniably hilarious even though its “too soon” energy feels 10 years too late and its jokes are telegraphed 45 minutes in advance. “The superpower of the theater is the element of surprise,” Doug preaches to the kids in an effort to keep them from squawking, but watching a child dressed up as Rudy Giuliani singing their heart out about needing help from above to save his tainted reputation is just funny. 

Why 9/11? That’s one of the many, many salient details this 84-minute film neglects to share with us. Odds are that it’s just the most taboo subject Doug could think of, but it doesn’t reveal anything meaningful about his character. Few things do. I suppose that subtext and/or nuance would have been counterintuitive to a movie that revels in the cromagnon banality of resentment — a movie that all too accurately sees the enmity of entitled white men as the simplest explanation for why our country is locked into a self-destructive tailspin that makes “Election” feel more ahead of its time than “The Musical” is in step with our own. “Everybody talks about the power of love,” Doug intones, “but nobody talks about the power of spite.” On the contrary, I’d argue that it’s all we talk about these days, in lieu of having any other choice. To whatever extent “The Musical” is worth watching, that’s only because it’s refreshing to hear people sing about it instead. 

Grade: C+

“The Musical” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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