Entertainment
In his Broadway debut, Robert Downey Jr. plays a writer who succumbs to AI in 'McNeal'
A friend texted soon after I arrived in New York to see “McNeal,” the new play by Ayad Akhtar at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont starring Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut. The message was prompted by the recently published bombshell in the New Yorker about David Adjmi’s Tony-winning play “Stereophonic.”
Bear with me for a second — there’s a connection.
My friend, an L.A.-based screenwriter, is a superfan of “Stereophonic” and was upset when he read that the play seems to recycle a number of details found in “Making Rumours,” a memoir by sound engineer Ken Caillat, who worked on several Fleetwood Mac albums. The playwright has downplayed any direct link between the legendary rock group and his play, which dramatizes the tense recording sessions of a 1970s band uncannily like Fleetwood Mac perfecting a magnum opus strikingly similar to “Rumours.” No one has taken the denials seriously. The parallels are glaringly obvious. But the New Yorker article, echoing earlier reporting, raises more complicated questions.
“Seems as if David Adjmi is a liar and plagiarist,” my friend wrote, more in sorrow than in anger. “You could say the same about Shakespeare,” I tendentiously texted back from Penn Station. The lawyers will fight it out, I added, but I “don’t think this takes away from what was [artistically] accomplished.”
About two hours later, a version of this same debate was taking place in “McNeal,” a play about an old literary lion seemingly on the brink of being canceled who falls under the spell of AI. A modern-day Faust story, Akhtar’s drama turns Faust into a prize-winning author who, after succumbing to the temptation of ChatGPT, doesn’t so much mourn the loss of his soul as wage a literary defense of his new dark arts.
A ferociously ambitious, politically incorrect writer who has been drinking himself to death after his wife’s suicide, Jacob McNeal (Downey) wants nothing more than to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. But when his dream finally comes true, he’s rattled by the heightened scrutiny that comes with the international spotlight.
McNeal has a closet crammed with skeletons. He’s friends with a group of high-profile men who have been me-too-ed and fears he might be next. His mentally ill wife took her life after discovering that he was having an affair. Akhtar sets up multiple paths for McNeal’s downfall. But the play is more concerned with abstract questions about art and originality than with the fate of one morally shady writer.
How indebted can a novelist be to the work of other people? Where is the line between creativity and plagiarism? (Were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides guilty of ripping off Homer?) If a writer gets an assist from a machine, can he legitimately claim authorship?
McNeal doesn’t subscribe to the Romantic view of the artist as solitary genius. His thinking is more aligned with that of literary scholar Harold Bloom, who contended that poems beget other poems, in a network of influence that owes as much to Darwin’s theory of evolution as to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex.
In his address to the Swedish Academy, McNeal argues for a more complex understanding of artistic originality by citing the example of “King Lear.” Shakespeare, McNeal posits, did something more radical than adapt “King Leir,” an anonymous Elizabethan play that he may have acted in. He rewrote the rules of tragedy, and in the process gave a glimpse of humanity’s moral and existential predicament that has yet to be matched.
“Put that original version of Leir into any of these fancy language models and run it through a hundred thousand times — you’ll never come close to reproducing the word order the Sweet Swan of Avon came up with,” McNeal asserts, as much in defense of his own borrowings as of Shakespeare’s.
Ruthie Ann Miles and Robert Downey Jr. in Lincoln Center Theater’s production of “McNeal.”
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
Akhtar, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Disgraced,” is continuing an argument he found himself embroiled in after publishing his brilliant 2020 novel “Homeland Elegies.” That book blends fact and fiction to tell the story of how America became Donald Trump-ified.
In interviews, Akhtar was routinely asked to explain his rationale for not simply writing a memoir when so much of his family’s history is in the book. Why call it a novel and raise ethical questions about the uses of autobiography? His answer was consistently the same: He was in search of a deeper truth. Conceiving the book as a novel allowed him to transcend the literal record of his life. For a creative artist, sources matter less than how they’re redeployed.
Akhtar reanimates this dialectical discussion of artistic freedom in the fraught context of AI. The problem is that the play is overwhelmed with ideas, themes and talking points. “McNeal” is swirling with things to say about literature — how it’s created, where it gets its value and why its truth can be so dangerous — but it’s as if ChatGPT had been asked to spit out the pros and cons of advanced technology on the practice of literature. The human story gets lost in the shuffle.
In scenes with his worried doctor (an underutilized Ruthie Ann Miles) and enabling agent (a lively Andrea Martin), McNeal reveals himself to be a charming literary creep. A moral dinosaur, he admits to Natasha Brathwaite (Brittany Bellizeare), a New York Times arts writer doing a magazine profile on him, that he actually envies men like Harvey Weinstein for “getting what they wanted.” She’s impressed by his reckless candor but suspects his flamboyant “transparency” is a way of throwing her off the scent of a bigger scandal.
Downey’s McNeal has the chiseled masculine swagger of such writers as Richard Ford and Paul Auster. Physically, he’s Hollywood’s ideal of the successful novelist — lean of build, coiffed like a tidied-up aging rock star and dressed with a studied casualness that would cost a small fortune to replicate.
Andrea Martin in Lincoln Center Theater’s production of “McNeal.”
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
A film actor unaccustomed to having to articulate to the back row, Downey relies on the excessive amplification of Bartlett Sher’s production. But his characterization is properly scaled for the stage. McNeal’s ambivalence is boldly handled: Unbridled egotism is punctured with regret. Downey, who plunged into tech’s moral gray zones in his “Iron Man” outings, makes it possible for an audience to both deplore McNeal and delight in the abrasive pleasure of his company. What his impressively embodied portrayal can’t overcome is the play’s lifeless set of relationships.
McNeal is continually refining the prompts he feeds his new best friend, ChatGPT, to improve the literary quality of his manuscript drafts. He asks the program to upload his collected works along with other material, including “King Lear,” “Oedipus Rex,” a smattering of Ibsen, psychiatric papers and the journals of his late wife. It’s this last item that gets him in trouble with his son, Harlan (Rafi Gavron), who has detected in his father’s latest novel a short story that his mother wrote, her one and only literary legacy.
The father-son standoff, in which Harlan threatens to expose McNeal’s literary crime to the New York Times in revenge for the way he treated his mother, is strangely unaffecting. Akhtar keeps tossing out red herrings. I began to imagine the prompt the playwright might have issued to the blinking cursor of his own computer while starting “McNeal”: “Write a Jon Robin Baitz play in the pugilistic intellectual style of Ayad Akhtar, and make it as unwieldy as possible within a 90-minute running time.”
The artificiality of the protagonist’s interactions made me wonder if the whole play might be an AI dream. The scenes all have something in them that feels slightly off, whether it’s dialogue that’s a little too on the nose or behavior that seems hollow. Are these characters, I asked myself midway through the play, or ideas of characters? Is there a core to the story or just an endless supply of plot permutations?
The production design, swooshing across Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton’s set, creates a background blizzard of technological flashes and blips. Audiences are drawn into the inner workings of the protagonist’s iPhone through Barton’s projections. A deepfake of Downey’s McNeal blends the image of his wife with historical figures from his literary output, including Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.
Akhtar clearly wants us to struggle to distinguish between reality and its AI-generated simulacrum. The question of perception, how we filter the world around us, has been a recurring theme in his playwriting. But it’s hard to sustain interest when a drama hasn’t given us sufficient reason to care about the characters. McNeal’s belated reckoning with Francine Blake (Melora Hardin), his former mistress whom he treated almost as badly as his wife, is no more meaningful to us than his reflex flirtations with Dipti (Saisha Talwar), his agent’s attractive 20-something assistant.
The plot, hinging on whether McNeal will face the consequences of his actions, is enlivened by Downey’s antihero bravado. But the play falls victim to AI‘s chief limitation — its emotional deadness.
Comedy is a matter of taste and preference — it’s a deeply personal thing. Which makes it hard for a critic to give a blanket assessment of a specific kind of comedy, especially if it didn’t work for them, but clearly worked for others (the laughter or lack thereof is the indication). “It’s not funny,” the critic says, “well I had fun,” someone else can reply, and then we’re at an impasse.
Which is the dilemma one finds oneself in with “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” a very strange and shaggy Hollywood satire of sorts from David Wain and The State crew, still riding the goodwill of “Wet Hot American Summer” after all these years. If only this were as funny.
“Gail Daughtry” lives in the same world as that iconic summer camp spoof, as well as Wain’s 2014 rom-com parody, “They Came Together,” in that he’s playing with genre convention and expectation, taking well-known norms to the goofiest extremes. But those films hewed more closely to their respective genres, while “Gail Daughtry” is totally scattered, combining crime and spy movie tropes with a fish-out-of-water comedy and a Hollywood send-up. It has far too many ideas for its own good, and yet no ideas that are good enough to sustain this bizarre curio of a comedy.
What’s ironic is that one of the problems driving this wacky plot forward is the characters have to come up with a movie idea to pitch to star Jon Hamm (playing himself of course), leading them to do some pretty inane and shockingly violent things. It’s almost as if Wain and co-writer and co-star Ken Marino had no idea for a movie, then baked their search for an idea into their script, and then turned it into a madcap adventure about a woman on a quest to have sex with Jon Hamm. What an ouroboros!
OK, about the sex quest. Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is a chipper hairdresser from Kansas born without the part of the brain that recognizes sarcasm or irony. She’s a cheerful, Pollyanna-ish naïf whose literal-mindedness is almost as extreme as Amelia Bedelia. Her childhood sweetheart and fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) is the same. She tells him about the concept of the “celebrity sex pass” as a joke, and he promptly boinks Jennifer Aniston at local book reading.
(Nitpicky aside: why didn’t they use the common nomenclature “hall pass”? Is it copyrighted? “Celebrity sex pass” is clunky and sounds like an off-brand version of the well-known slang.)
That infidelity crisis is how Gail ends up in Los Angeles determined to bang Hamm, collecting a motley crew of similarly clueless helpers along the way. There’s her best friend Otto (Miles Guttierez-Riley), her salon bestie; Caleb (Ben Wang), an overly ambitious intern at Creative Artists Agency; Vince (Marino), a screenwriter turned paparazzo with a heart of gold; and John Slattery, as John Slattery, down on his luck. An accidental briefcase swap has a pair of thugs on their tail, in a forgettable and underdeveloped B-plot.
With a parade of celebrity cameos and collaborators in bit parts, “Gail Daughtry” at times feels like an excuse for Wain and co. to make something at home with all of their friends. Fair enough, it’s great to see all these people employed, but what about what we’re watching? Behold, the Los Angeles of the middle-aged working comedian: the CAA lobby, the Chateau Marmont, Griffith Park, etc. And the plot is as half-baked as the pitch they present to Hamm.
What’s actually interesting about this comedy is the distinct streak of despair and even resentment that reveals itself at the climax, a feeling of helplessness and uselessness. Everyone’s been striving to make it in this crazy town: the intern, the actor, the paparazzo. But not even Jon Hamm can help them get a movie made; even he feels inherently powerless. There’s an unexplored anxiety vibrating there that feels the most thematically fruitful, about what it means, some 25 years after bursting onto the scene with a generation-defining comedy, about maintaining the work, the drive, a sense of purpose, after years of strikes, and in the face of a constricting industry. Do they still have it? Is the dream still alive?
Maybe that’s why Wain and Marino need to invent a dreamer stand-in with Gail, a guileless eternal optimist who knows nothing of the craven Los Angeles and accepts everything at face value (though she is filled with a scary bit of rage too). She might behave like she has a head injury, but she’s going to achieve her goal, dammit. “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” might not be as funny as “Wet Hot American Summer” (for this critic), but reframed, it serves as a fascinating status update on life in La La Land for this troupe.
‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’
2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for sexual content, violence/bloody images and language)
Running time: 1:33
How to watch: In theaters July 10
Entertainment
Emily Ratajkowski’s viral essay on sex life as a single mom scores her a seven-figure book deal
Emily Ratajkowski’s viral essay detailing her sex life as a single mom just landed her a seven-figure book deal.
According to Page Six, the model’s essay in the Cut had publishers champing at the bit in a 12-way bidding war that culminated in the hefty pay day. Editor Helen Rouner at Penguin Press — who also edited Lauren Christensen’s memoir “Firstborn” and Michael W. Clune’s novel “Pan” — reportedly landed the deal.
Penguin Press did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment Friday.
Publishers Marketplace announced the forthcoming memoir, describing it as “an examination of modern female identity through the story of the author’s own efforts as a newly single mother in New York City to discover what really constitutes a good life for a woman.”
The essay, which dropped a month ago and quickly broke the internet, drops the veil on EmRata’s sexual adventures (or maybe misadventures) since she and her former husband, Sebastian Bear-McClard, split in 2022.
“It was a violent transition into a new reality of screaming baby on my aching tit and ring on my swollen finger,” Ratajkowski writes of new motherhood. “And then, in a time period that felt both instant and excruciatingly slow, my marriage collapsed. Six months after my son was born, my husband and I stopped having sex. Less than a year later, we separated.”
In the missive, the model interrogates her sexuality — is she a Madonna or a whore? — while untangling bigger questions around gender, power and self-actualization. If Carrie Bradshaw wrote about “Sex and the City,” then Ratajkowski is writing about sex, the city and single motherhood. And naturally, her fleeting paramours have vague monikers: “Vegan Graffiti Artist,” “Spanish Gen-Zer” and “Son of a Billionaire.”
“And then there was the Elder Millennial: obsessed with dental hygiene, psychedelics, and dirty talk,” she writes. “He had approached the subject coyly at first, like it was something he was kind of embarrassed about — the way a kid will test you to see if you’ll talk to them about their dorky obsession of the moment. Do you like Godzilla? What about Star Wars?”
Would-be sleuths with Ratajkowski’s essay and a gossip rag handy will have their work cut out for them.
This will be Ratajkowski’s second book. The first, “My Body,” dropped in 2021 and was a bestselling collection of essays exploring gender, power dynamics, sexuality and the commodification of female beauty in the modeling and entertainment industries.
Ratajkowski’s foray into the spotlight came more than a decade ago when Robin Thicke’s controversial “Blurred Lines” music video made the model an overnight star. She was cast in David Fincher’s adaptation of “Gone Girl,” which hit theaters the following year, and catapulted to top fashion runways — Marc Jacobs, Versace, Victoria’s Secret and Dolce & Gabbana, to name a few. She she’s been romantically linked to Harry Styles, Eric Andre, Shaboozey, Brad Pitt and Pete Davidson, among others.
In 2023, she moonlighted as the host of the “High Low With EmRata” podcast, where she interviewed sex workers, investigated ethical nonmonogamy and pondered the etymology of the word “toxic.” The same year, she told The Times that she was coming into herself post-divorce, “Being able to assert what I want — that feels like it just started: My life as a creator and not as a muse.”
Wainheads will be delighted to see his alums in cameos: Kerri Kenney-Silver, Michael Ian Black, Thomas Lennon, and supporting roles for Zickel and Truglio. A large portion of the cast are his homies. But with Deutch, Gutierrez-Riley, Wang, Slattery, Impacciatore, and yes, Hamm, it’s as if they’re being inducted into a new mad family. Wain and Marino are basically catching Pokémon and hoping they can hold onto the roster (by that logic, yes, Paul Rudd is a legendary Pokémon). The film is anchored by Zoey — everything everywhere all this summer with Voicemails From Isabelle to Minions & Monsters — Deutch in the Dorothy Gale role, exuding a high level of perkiness consistent with the character’s can-do, wide-eyed, midwestern charm and heart.
A major standout, Ben Wang finally gets to show off his comedic abilities, portraying a self-assured, quick-witted agent who makes me laugh every time he reveals his sheltered upbringing in snappy whines at every inconvenience. Sabrina Impacciatore, who has proven to be a comedic juggernaut in The Paper, is having so much fun hamming it up as the mob boss-esque wicked witch counterpart, torturing her henchmen and deliciously chewing up the scenery whenever onscreen. I don’t think they use her to the height of her comedic prowess, but she’s a delight nonetheless. John Slattery is the film’s comedic MVP. The way the writers use his over-the-top character for comedy is downright hilarious every time. They use him as either a punchline or a force of nature, and he’s great. This movie is like Mad Men propaganda, and by God, it works. As someone who’s never seen it, Gail allowed me a better appreciation for Slattery and Hamm.
Man, we don’t deserve Jon Hamm. This is the second time I’ve seen him play a silly, fictionalized version of himself this year (the other being the SXSW crowd-pleasing rom-com Wishful Thinking, which Gail distributor Sony Pictures Classics acquired), and he also voice-acted in his comedic Mayor Jerry role in Hoppers. Maybe working with Wain in 2007’s The Ten was the canon event, but I consider his weird little sex scene with Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids his awakening. Since then, I’ve only seen him as unserious, and it’s delightful. Oz-like in appearance, he’s funny and befitting the film’s overall light, joyful nature.
LAST STATEMENT
Ultimately, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a campy, delightful romp that succeeds as both a distinctive Hollywood‑centric riff and a Wizard of Oz reimagining, retaining a loving, twisted, demented charm. It’s a weird description, but it’s so high‑spirited and light‑hearted despite being strangely ultraviolent. It might as well be a live‑action episode of Smiling Friends (RIP), yet it’s everything the theatrical market needs today. Ten years ago, this would’ve been a studio production rather than an indie Sundance acquisition, but thank God it exists for the big screen. More absurdist Gail Daughtrys for cinemas (not streaming), please, because this is the most fun to be had in a theater all summer, if not the year thus far.
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