Bradley Cooper‘s “Is This Thing On?” stars Will Arnett and Laura Dern as Alex and Tess Novak, a married couple with kids that gets a divorce deep into their 40s. It has all the elements you expect to see in a divorce movie, including the couple failing miserably to hide their relationship status from their kids and friends; scenes where each partner talks through problems with their kooky best friend; and a sequence capturing the mix of anxiety and excitement a newly single person feels when they realise they’re on the verge of being with somebody new, and the rush of annoyance and jealousy their ex feels when they learn of it.

Luckily, this is the kind of movie that makes familiar story elements feel fresh by creating believably complex characters and putting them in situations that are at once universal and extremely specific. For instance, we get the classic divorce movie scene where one of the exes suddenly has a chance to meet up with somebody who could help their career and asks their former partner to watch the kids for the night with zero notice, and even though the former partner has a date that night, they say yes, then secretly subcontract childcare to the grandparents. The twist here is, the second partner’s date is not with a person. It’s at a place: a comedy club.

Alex is vaguely “in finance.” His first open mic night happens because he’s wandering around depressed in New York’s West Village and impulsively decides to see some standup comedy at a club, but doesn’t have enough to pay the cash-only cover charge. So he impulsively adds his name to the list of amateur performers so he can get in free. His first performance is terrible. The material amounts to, “Hi, I’m getting a divorce, and it sucks,” and his pauses are long enough to bake a pie in. But he gets off one decent line, and has a rough, unaffected quality that catches the audience’s fancy. There’s a consensus among the other comics in the house that he’s not a lost cause. So he comes back for another go-round with more confidence and does marginally better. Soon he’s rehearsing jokes in his bedroom and scrawling ideas in on loose sheets of paper.

Tess, meanwhile, is charting her own course. She was once a good enough volleyball player to make the women’s Olympic team, but gave it up to be a wife and mother in the suburbs. She’s been bitter about that sacrifice ever since, even though she’s never dare admit it to anyone, including herself. She decides to take up coaching, investigates some new leads and calls up old connections. She even asks her old friend Laird, a coach, for advice. Peyton Manning, former NFL quarterback turned sports TV personality, plays Laird. Earnest and committed but not entirely natural, Manning is the weak link in the main cast. But the main cast is so formidable that he has nothing to be ashamed of.

Directed, co-produced co-written, co-starring, and partly shot by Cooper (who will probably do all those jobs on the next movie, plus catering), “Is This Thing On?” is the best of the three films Cooper has directed, mainly because it’s the one that seems to care the least about impressing us. Which is to say that, although it’s as technically accomplished as Cooper’s “A Star is Born” and “Maestro,” it subsumes its considerable craft beneath layers of minutely observed behaviour. The result is a stealthily special movie, the kind you might write off as “light” entertainment until you realise a few weeks later that you’re still thinking about it.