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. ~this review continues on IndieWire~
