Jesse Eisenberg's 'The Debut' lands its first trailer with Julianne Moore at war over a bit part

A24 put the first trailer and two posters for Jesse Eisenberg's "The Debut" online this week, the first real look at the movie he made after "A Real Pain" won him a screenwriting Oscar in 2024. It is not the swing you might expect a newly minted awards-season name to take. It is a chamber comedy about a community theater in New Jersey, and the war that breaks out inside it.

Julianne Moore plays Mona Friedman, a shy housewife who lands a bit part in her local company's new musical and decides, somewhere between the first read-through and opening night, that the bit part is the most important role in American theater. Paul Giamatti is the director on the other side of that conviction, a small-pond tyrant who wants the production to behave and cannot understand why his newest recruit will not. The trailer is mostly the two of them escalating, Moore turning meekness into something closer to zealotry, Giamatti's patience thinning by the scene.

If that setup rings a bell, the echo of the "Streetcar Named Marge" episode of "The Simpsons" is hard to miss, the one where a suburban nobody pours her whole self into amateur theater and finds it stares back. The AV Club made the comparison directly. Eisenberg seems to know exactly what register he is in: the deadly seriousness people bring to low-stakes art, and how funny and a little sad that seriousness looks from the outside.

Eisenberg's third time behind the camera

This is Eisenberg's third feature as a writer-director, after "When You Finish Saving the World" in 2022 and "A Real Pain" in 2024. "A Real Pain" is the one that changed his standing. It got him the Best Original Screenplay Oscar and got Kieran Culkin a Supporting Actor win, and it did the hard thing of being slight on purpose without feeling thin. "The Debut" looks like a continuation of that interest in people who are difficult in small, recognizable ways, scaled up to a louder ensemble.

Moore has worked with him before. She led "When You Finish Saving the World," and letting her drive a comedy is the most promising thing in the trailer. Giamatti playing a man losing a battle he assumed he had already won is close to type, which is to say close to great. The supporting bench is deep: Halle Bailey, Havana Rose Liu, Colton Ryan, Lilli Cooper, Maulik Pancholy, and, in the kind of casting that tells you the movie cares about its world, Broadway's Bernadette Peters. Eisenberg turns up in a small role himself.

A fall release, and the awards math

A24 has not set a date. The reporting points to a fall theatrical release after a likely festival run, which is the studio telling you how it sees the movie. Fall plus festivals plus Julianne Moore plus a screenwriter coming off an Oscar is the arithmetic of a contender, and the trailer is selling it that way.

There is some whiplash here. Eisenberg can also be heard this summer voicing a character in "Minions & Monsters," out July 1. One week he is in a Universal animated blockbuster, a few months later he is asking audiences to care about who gets the second lead in a New Jersey musical. The second one is the movie he wrote and directed.

The trailer cannot tell you whether the film works. Eisenberg's comedy lives or dies on whether the cringe stays human instead of curdling into contempt for its characters, and that is a thing you only know once the lights go down. What the trailer does establish is that he is not coasting on the Oscar. He went smaller and weirder, and he handed the movie to two actors who can carry weird. That is a good sign.