What's happening at TIFF: Musical comedy 'The Debut' dazzles and 'I Play Rocky' scores a knockout

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TORONTO (AP) — The 51st Toronto International Film Festival is underway, with steady parades of premieres running like traffic jams through downtown Toronto. Here are glimpses of what's happening on the ground, and what festivalgoers are talking about.

It takes a certain amount of gumption to declare an arch comedy about a housewife turned community musical theater actor “autobiographical,” but that's exactly what writer-director Jesse Eisenberg said Sunday about his festival smash hit “The Debut.”

Eisenberg premiered “The Debut,” starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti, at TIFF, shortly after it first screened at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. But the movie's first showing before a big, packed theater could hardly have gone better, confirming “The Debut” as a major awards contender.

In it, Moore plays Mona Friedman, a shy New Jersey mom who, after an actor drops out, lands a small role in a production of “Nosy Neighbors” — a fictional musical Eisenberg conjured, complete with songs, for the film. Despite no apparent talent and with Giamatti playing her intensely controlling director, she quickly becomes enamored with acting — similar, Eisenberg said, to how his thespian awakening happened as a nervous, timid young man.

“I felt invisible and I hated everything. And then I started community theater. This movie takes place five minutes from my house in 1990,” Eisenberg said. “Then what happened was I took it so serious and I took it so far that I kind of ruined my whole life.”

“So it's an autobiographical movie but told through you,” Eisenberg said, turning to Moore. “Because I wrote this for her, and only her.”

“The Debut,” which A24 will release in December, has a comic, surreal pitch that one audience member, in the post-screening Q&A, wondered if it took some of its tone from Christopher Guest's 1996 mocumentary “Waiting for Guffman,” about a local musical production in Missouri.

But Eisenberg said he was striving for something more earnest. Even the fake musical of the film, for which Eisenberg wrote seven original songs, the filmmaker said was his favorite kind of play, regardless of how cheesy.

Moore, whose performance manages to be both wildly over-the-top and sincere, said Mona is just “a regular woman.”

“But she finds meaning in community for the first time in her life, and that to me was so, so moving,” Moore said. “She's us, she's me, she's Paul, she's Jesse. We're the people who kind of wandered in and found a path into our lives by trying out for a play.”

Eight years after “Green Book” took the Toronto International Film Festival by storm, Peter Farrelly may have done it again.

Farrelly’s “I Play Rocky,” a boisterous tale about the making of Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky,” was an immediate crowd-pleasing hit Saturday night at TIFF. Its raucous reception at the Princess of Wales Theatre suggested Farrelly may have again thrown a dark horse contender into the Oscar race.

At the least, “I Play Rocky” is sure to be a top contender for TIFF’s top prize, the People’s Choice Award, given how enthusiastic the festival crowd jumped to its feet to applaud the movie. In 2018, Farrelly's “Green Book” picked up that festival-goer-voted award on its way to winning best picture at the Academy Awards.

“I read this script and I thought it was the greatest script I’d ever read,” Farrelly said of Peter Gamble’s screenplay in a brief Q&A following the screening.

“I Play Rocky” chronicles Stallone’s quixotic journey to write and star in his 1976 breakthrough film. In Farrelly’s telling, it’s a comic underdog story and an affectionate ode to moviemaking — the kind of tale Hollywood tends to love. Some of its best supporting performances are P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell as producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, and Tracy Letts as a composite studio chief.

But Anthony Ippolito, who plays Stallone, drew the warmest cheers Saturday for a role the 27-year-old Long Island native had dearly sought. The actor, who played Al Pacino in the Paramount+ series “The Offer,” sent in audition tapes of himself performing scenes in his grandmother's basement before Farrelly had even begun the casting search.

“I looked at it and the search was over,” Farrelly said. “That’s the guy. We didn’t have to go any further.”

Amazon MGM will release “I Play Rocky” in theaters Nov. 6.

A year after Curry Barker first premiered “Obsession” at TIFF, the filmmaker and his star, Inde Navarrette, returned for a victory lap.

In the midnight section of last year's festival, “Obsession” first hit audiences, quickly prompting a bidding war. Focus Features landed the $750,000 indie horror film for about $15 million in what would become one of the most lucrative festival acquisitions ever. This year, “Obsession” grossed $512 million worldwide.

“What a difference a year makes!” said Peter Kuplowsky, TIFF Midnight Madness programmer.

Their return was partly strategic. Focus is now gearing up for an awards season campaign for “Obsession,” running the film in many categories, including best picture and best actress for 25-year-old Navarrette.

“Everything changed for me. I am now in rooms that I could not even imagine,” Navarrette said. “I’m now pitching my own projects and am hopefully able to produce and direct my own stuff. It’s been really, really exciting because I love cinema and I love filmmaking and being a part of Midnight Madness last year lit that fire for me.”

Barker, 26, and Navarrette spoke in a staged talk at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, not far from the theater where “Obsession” debuted. In the year since, Barker said he has realized that his movie now belongs to audiences.

“It starts to feel like it’s not mine anymore,” Barker said. “It’s not mine anymore.”

A running question through film festivals this year has been: Where are the major movie studio movies?

The first pang of unease came when Warner Bros. last September skipped all the fall festivals and instead launched Paul Thomas Anderson's “One Battle After Another” right into theaters — even premiering it while TIFF was going on. You could hardly question a strategy that paid off with a best-picture win at the Oscars.

The major studios generally don't produce the kinds of movies that launch at fall festivals anymore. And for the few adult-driven, non-franchise studio movies that get made, the downside of a festival — unpredictable critic response; an inconvenient release date — has sometimes meant festivals aren't worth the risk. Just ask the producers of “Joker: Folie à Deux,” which was immediately slammed at its Venice Film Festival launch in 2024.

“I hope the studios will come back,” Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux said on the eve of a Cannes that lacked any major Hollywood film.

This fall, Warner Bros.' anticipated “Digger,” directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and starring Tom Cruise, is bypassing festivals. But it's not the only big title to do so. Also missing in action are Sony's “The Social Reckoning,” Aaron Sorkin's Facebook follow-up to “The Social Network,” and Netflix's “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth,” from David Fincher and Brad Pitt.

At the same time, the potential attention-grabbing showcase of a festival has rarely had more obvious upside. A small, surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival of A24's “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, was enough to make it one of the most buzzed-about movies of the year.

TIFF has traditionally been home to the kind of populist, midbudget movie that Hollywood now seldom produces. To make up for that absence, the festival has increasingly programmed movies up for sale, in the hopes of luring studios to acquire something that pops with Toronto audiences. This year, the festival officially launched a movie market.

Companies like Netflix, Apple, Amazon MGM, Neon, A24 and Mubi tend to be the dominant players at festivals — so it can depend where you're looking and how you define “major studio.” On Thursday night, the top brass of Warner Bros. was at TIFF, too. Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, co-chairs and chief executives of the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, attended. They were on hand to trumpet the studio's new specialty label, Clockwork.

Clockwork's first release will be “Ti Amo!” from Sean Baker. Few filmmakers can better attest to the power of film festivals than Baker. Last year, his “Anora” went from Palme d'Or winner at Cannes to best-picture winner at the Academy Awards.

Opening night at TIFF belonged to Siân Heder's “Being Heumann,” a true-story drama about the disability rights pioneer Judy Heumann and the 1977 sit-in that sparked the movement leading to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Like Heder's last film, the best picture-winning “CODA,” Heder made “Being Heumann” with an ensemble you don't usually see on screen. Actors with disabilities play many of the major roles, including Ruth Madeley, who stars as Heumann.

The film, which Apple will release in November, makes a powerful case not just for a seminal moment in disability rights history but for casts that authentically reflect underrepresented communities.

As the saying goes, the best way to start a film festival is with a taxidermy musical.

One of the first premieres this year was “Stuffed,” and it's sure to remain one of the most peculiar, macabre and oddly sweet entries of the festival. Theo Rhys’ debut feature, the opener of TIFF's Discovery section, stars Jodie Comer as Araminta, a reclusive taxidermist. Her long-held dream of stuffing a human is answered when a lonely man named Bernie (Harry Melling), who works in a sandwich factory, steps forward to volunteer. Araminta, a little like the inverse of Dr. Frankenstein, promises death but a strange kind of frozen-in-time immortality.

It's a tribute to this quirkily gothic tale and its extraordinary leads that it's also quite a tender romance. “Stuffed” would pair remarkably well with Harry Lighton’s not-so-different “Pillion,” from earlier this year, also starring Melling as a timid soul looking for obliteration, or love. Melling remains a singular screen presence, and it continues to be fascinating to see what kind of situations he gets himself into.