‘The Musical’ Review: A Middle-School Drama Teacher Certainly Brings the Drama in an Off-Kilter Comedy

For those of us who saw it when we were still in school ourselves, Alexander Payne’s “Election” was a startling work, and even a perspective-shifting one — a snarlingly funny introduction to the idea that our least favorite teachers might just hate their job as much as we hated their doing it. Making a similar point with similar venom is tyro director Giselle Bonilla‘s unapologetically jaundiced black comedy “The Musical,” though in this case, ambitious students aren’t the enemy. Instead, they’re eagerly complicit allies to one embittered educator looking to burn the whole system down. Or at least to get his girlfriend-stealing boss fired, if he’s being both honest and petty about it.

Expanded from a short film made by Bonilla (and a number of her collaborators here) while studying at the AFI Conservatory, “The Musical” lines up a number of hot-button topics for satire — cancel culture, representation politics, even social anxiety around 9/11 — but resists pressing on them too hard. Instead, this short, nasty film finds much of its sharpest humor in good old-fashioned misanthropy. Specifically, that of nerdy, permanently aggrieved middle-school drama teacher Doug Leibovitz: an inspired comic creation by screenwriter Alexander Heller and character actor Will Brill, who permit him to be both recklessly horrible and strangely, sadly heroic in his determination to stick it to the man, or one man in particular.

The result, premiering in competition at Sundance, is an acquired bad taste, but riotously funny at its most daring. Offbeat indie distributors should take in interest in a work that, despite some tonal wobbles of its own, stands out from the festival pack for its brazen anti-earnestness.

“Everybody talks about the power of love,” says Doug to one of his more admiring young charges, “but nobody talks about the power of spite.” In the ranks of inspirational lines spoken in movie classrooms, it’s unlikely to be quoted quite as often as “Carpe diem.” But Doug himself would be the first to admit that he doesn’t have much useful life advice to offer, given the current disparity between his own life and his dreams. Pushing forty and still an aspiring playwright, he takes little delight in directing the annual school musical. Last year’s, however, was less of a chore than usual, thanks to the participation of pretty, enthusiastic art teacher Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), which cued a brief and unlikely romance between them.

At the start of a new school year, Doug finds himself briskly friendzoned by Abigail, and patronized by the school’s glib, smarmy principal Brady (a perfectly cast Rob Lowe) — who, it turns out, has swiftly succeeded him in Abigail’s affections. Brady, the kind of bland whitebread manager given to compensatory assertions of his own political correctness (“You’ve been a mensch — am I saying that right?” he says to Leibovitz), is fixated on getting a coveted blue ribbon from the state education board. Doug’s planned production of “West Side Story” should help in that regard, provided it’s sensitively and diversely cast in all the right places.

That’s music to the ears of keen Latina theater kid Lata (superb first-timer Melanie Herrera), who promptly starts lobbying for the role of Maria. Doug, though, sees an altogether different opportunity — to get his own back on his better-paid, better-looking love rival, and depart the school theater world in a blaze of glory. It would be spoiling a couple of the film’s most dementedly funny comic setpieces to reveal just what alternative plans he has for opening night, though he finds a gaggle of willing, improbable conspirators in his drama students, who are happy to do pretty much anything so long as it’s on center stage.

A Tony-winning stage actor who has long been a trusty indie ensemble player, Brill seizes his most substantial film role to date with sneering relish, finding a core of woebegone loneliness in Doug that makes sense of his malevolent excesses — without losing sight of the unremarkable milquetoast figure he cuts to most outsiders. Bonilla’s comic direction isn’t always on quite the same page, sometimes favoring shrill amplification over deadpan understatement, while Mateo Nossa’s stormy, percussive score punctuates turns in Heller’s writing that are already plenty witty or shocking on their own. A climactic needle-drop of Enigma’s kitsch new-age classic “Return to Innocence” over scenes of schoolroom bedlam feels like gilding the lily on an exercise already rich in tonal havoc.

But no matter: Like its eminently problematic anti-hero, “The Musical” says its piece with conviction to spare, and a welcome streak of cat-among-the-pigeons danger rarely found in contemporary American comedy. Doug may be motivated purely by personal grievance and heartbreak, but he winds up quite pointedly skewering the hypocrisy of systems — educational, social, political, take your pick — where tokenism trumps meaningful change, and where playing nice means the same old guys finish first.