“Misty Green,” Chris Rock’s ferociously smart and darkly entrancing new movie, unfolds as a series of rude awakenings. One takes place in a hospital after a drunk-driving accident; another at a far-flung desert resort, in an ugly morning-after haze. But most of them occur in a Santa Monica beachside apartment, where Misty Green (Rosalind Eleazar), a down-on-her-luck actor in her late thirties, has been squatting since the death of its owner, her wealthy, older, married boyfriend, about a year ago. In an early scene, Misty is jolted awake by the man’s furious widow, Celine (Amy Landecker), who has just discovered the apartment on her husband’s ledgers and is intent on kicking out his mistress. Misty, still groggy from the latest of many boozy, coked-up nights, begs for some time to get her stuff together and find a new place. And Celine, surprisingly, gives it to her. She hadn’t recognized Misty at first, not until she noticed an Emmy statuette in the living room—the one that the actor won years ago, in 2009, for a supporting role on an airline-themed TV series, “The Red Eye.” “Oh, my God, I remember you,” Celine says. “You were the Black one!”

In an industry town, celebrity still wields a potent allure, even when faded, bedraggled, and accosted in a bra and fish-net tights. Misty’s lingering fame is one of a few cards she has left to play; her undiminished talent as an actor is another. One of the wry ironies of the movie, which Rock both wrote and directed, is that Misty’s abilities may have been a mixed blessing, thrusting her early on into the glare of a spotlight that she has since struggled to hold on to. After the initial waves of acclaim and success inevitably crested, Misty crashed hard. Sex, drugs, and alcohol flowed and kept flowing her way, even as roles dried up. She became an on-set liability—punching a crew member, sleeping with a co-star—which eclipsed her reputation for doing good work. Now she faces the threat of eviction: Celine has given her a week to move out. “Misty Green,” an acrid show-biz satire that reaches for, and nearly achieves, the weight and grandeur of tragedy, is also a countdown thriller, with a day-by-day structure that brings Misty’s past, present, and future into fateful collision. Her tough personal history comes into focus even as she flails in search of a career-reigniting comeback.

The odds are not in her favor, owing as much to the industry’s profound systemic inequities as to Misty’s own penchant for self-sabotage. “The Red Eye” is long gone, but the insulting, tokenizing logic of so much diversity-conscious casting remains an evergreen scourge. Over the course of her insane week, Misty tries out for two movies: one, a remake of the 1994 gangster drama “Fresh”; the other, a new version of the musical “Dreamgirls,” which was previously adapted for the screen in 2006. That there would be reboots of these two specific movies strains credulity in a fanciful, somewhat didactic way, but Rock, steering us through a variety of audition rituals, gives them a situational texture, an industry-savvy filigree, that pulls us in. He’s poking fun at Hollywood’s chronic dearth of original ideas, but he’s also measuring the snug dimensions of the box into which the Misty Greens of the world have been squeezed. In this schema, she can be either Nichole or Deena Jones, either a drug dealer’s junkie girlfriend or a pop supernova.

Both roles may be steeped in cliché, but they’re hardly equivalent opportunities. For Misty, “Dreamgirls” is a dream project, not least because she’s a terrific singer—an essential qualification to play Deena, you’d think, but also a relative rarity in her field. Rock has an old-timey affection for an earlier Hollywood heyday when performers in front of the camera could reliably sing as well as they could act. (At one important juncture, he boldly positions Misty against an enormous studio-lot mural of Marilyn Monroe in “The Seven Year Itch,”—an allusion suffused with both tenderness and dread.) The director seldom seems more in awe of Misty than when she’s showing off her pipes, as when she croons a haunting cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” at the Roosevelt Hotel. Eleazar forgoes Thom Yorke-style belting, draws out the mournful quaver in the lyrics, and subtly reshapes the anthem in Misty’s image, her commitment to doing things her way.

“Misty Green” is a small yet principled corrective to the larger problem it diagnoses: it’s a terrific vehicle for a Black actress who knows how few terrific or even good vehicles there are for Black actresses. And Eleazar, a British-born performer whose credits include the series “Slow Horses” and the 2020 film “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” gives an extraordinarily alert, vivid, and electrifying performance. There’s a quality of irreducibility to Eleazar’s acting; when Misty pulls back her hair and strides into an audition for a part that she knows is beneath her, we see inextricable layers of grit and anger, exasperation and fatigue. But we also see a quietly insistent hopefulness—a foolhardy belief that the next script, the next schmoozefest, or the next phone call to her absentee agent (Topher Grace) might bring deliverance.

Crucially, Misty hasn’t lost her ability to connect with people, especially her friend Naomi (Anna Kendrick), who’s planning to quit acting and settle down with her adoring, much-cheated-on fiancé (Rich Sommer). Misty also has a brother, Jay (Daniel Kaluuya), who’s bipolar, and who has picked the least convenient of weeks to pop back up in his sister’s life. Yet she’s genuinely delighted to see him, never treating him or anyone she loves as an imposition. Again and again, Misty comes fully alive in the presence of others—a saving grace in a town that still often runs on chance meetings, fateful reunions, and testy but resilient relationships.

One succinct but memorable subplot features a veteran casting director, Rhonda (Tracie Thoms), who, in the space of just a few scenes with Misty, evokes an entire work history, rife with resentment but also grudging respect. (Cheekily, the movie shows us old audition footage of a younger Misty trying out for the Anne Hathaway role in “The Devil Wears Prada”—a wink-wink joke that acquires a third wink when you remember that in that movie Thoms played Hathaway’s best friend.) But some bonds are less healthy than others, and the clear villain of “Misty Green” is Zach (a seductively menacing Adam Driver), an actor turned self-styled industry power player. Zach is a deep-pocketed purveyor of sleaze, the corrupting snake in Misty’s already rotten Tinseltown Eden, and he keeps slithering into the picture when she least expects it, always threatening to wreak havoc on her progress. In a week as high-stakes as this one, a quick hit of pleasure—a snort of coke, a bathroom-stall fuck—is likely to bring the next rude awakening.

In Rock’s three previous directorial efforts, he hurled us, with a bracing lack of ceremony, into the paths of Black men with an enviable yet precarious measure of success. He starred in each of these, and their comedy grew organically out of his own persona. In the thin but genial “Head of State” (2003), he played a Washington, D.C., alderman unexpectedly thrust into the role of an underdog Presidential candidate. In the more expansively funny and thoughtful “Top Five” (2014), he was a standup comedian turned Hollywood A-lister, with a looming flop on his hands and a combative reporter on his tail. Rock gives himself a supporting role in “Misty Green,” playing Jordan Green (no relation), a successful film director who spouts off about the limitations of Black progress in historically racist spheres of power. It’s a funny, familiar bit, but Rock doesn’t push the humor too hard, here or elsewhere, instead keeping the focus on Misty and playing her travails unnervingly straight. He knows that laughter shouldn’t be our chief response to the drama of a woman with a self-destructive streak—an impulse that seems, finally, inextricable from the ethos of an industry that cannibalizes its own.

Even so, Rock hasn’t lost the comedian’s exploratory, how-far-can-we-push-this instinct, and “Misty Green” is, in ways both messy and thrillingly unpredictable, something of a patchwork, a jangly fusion of tones and ideas. Recurring overhead shots of the beach, often accompanied by an ultra-moody cover of “California Dreamin’,” mark the film as a wary love letter to Los Angeles, as does an opening montage of locations across the city: Santa Monica Pier, the Cinerama Dome, the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Some of the images have a vintage glory; others reveal the wounds of a city where homelessness is on the rise and wildfire season is practically a year-round affair.

In the story’s oddest yet most loaded digression, we hear frequent news chatter about the murder of a white U.S.C. coed, allegedly by a Black man—a report, later found to be erroneous, that has unsurprisingly grievous repercussions for Black men across the city, including Misty’s brother, Jay. Kaluuya plays Jay with a low-simmering intensity that is mostly hidden behind a what-me-worry smile but sometimes flares, suddenly and terrifyingly, into the open. Rosalind Eleazar is the revelation in “Misty Green,” but it’s no mega-meta leap to view the film as a potential factor in someone else’s overdue comeback: Kaluuya won an Oscar for “Judas and the Black Messiah” (2021) and gave a classic action-star turn in “Nope” (2022), but he’s been largely absent from the big screen since. It’s great to see him again, in a performance that reaffirms his stature as one of the singularly arresting talents in American movies. ♦