Now I get it. Now I see what all the Bradley Cooper fuss is about. As the sensitive, sexy, bi-polar misfit centerpiece of David O. Russell’s new film—Silver Linings Playbook—Cooper manages to register sweetness, rage, and screwball genius, sometimes all at once. He is hugely wonderful as the tortured recovering wild man, the electrified silver lining if you will, of Russell’s homage to barely-controlled domestic chaos and anger management “issues.”

Matched mano a mano by Jennifer —The Hunger Games—Lawrence, Cooper’s character Pat is fresh out of a mental hospital and moving back into his parent’s home in South Philadelphia when we meet him.

Thanks to an unidentified act of violence, Pat has lost everything. Gone are his home, his job, and his wife about whom he retains delusional fantasies of a reunion. But he does have the support of his mom (Jacki Weaver) and obsessive Eagles fan father (Robert de Niro, in his finest performance in years). The fringe of this brisk, very funny, often heartbreaking film is littered with Dad’s bookie buddies, a much-loathed brother, an OCD friend from the stir, and friends of his wife—all of whom mean well, but almost always push Pat’s buttons until he flips utterly out of control. Paced like a thinking person’s sit-com, Silver Linings offers up scene after scene that plays like brilliant comedy, while coaxing sobering moments of truth up to the surface.

As the tender/tough often-medicated Tiffany, Golden Globe-award winner Lawrence is just as out of step as Pat. Recently widowed, Tiffany has thrown herself into meaningless sex, drinking, and is now freshly out of work. The two “losers” meet, their hormones tune in, but Pat is delusionally convinced that he must win back his estranged wife, despite her restraining order against him. Cooper’s Pat is gloriously obsessed, even as he is also obviously attracted to Tiffany. He wants to get in touch with his ex, and Tiffany offers him a trade. If Pat agrees to enter a dance contest as her partner, she’ll contact his wife. A deal is hatched, but not without a lot of fussing and fuming from Pat’s dad.

Here De Niro is letter perfect as the obsessed football fan, so superstitious about Sunday ritual of watching the Eagles that he’s convinced Pat has to watch the football games with him in order for them to win. There’s a psychiatrist in the plot of course, and a fellow funny farm inmate who keeps turning up and offering sage advice. It’s a delicious cast of gold-plated sit-com characters, and all of them just barely kept in control by director Russell, who seems to know how close real life is to over-the-top Greek tragi-comedy.

These folks are at each other’s throats (think back to Archie Bunker, or even vintage Woody Allen), and yet their hopes, fears, craziness and sweetness also hearken back to the heyday of slapstick comedy. Silver Linings Playbook is a terrific little film that packs a huge punch. The part the audience loves most is that we can see the chemistry between both the leads (Cooper and Lawrence connect from start to finish) and their characters (clearly cut out of the same outsider cloth). We know they’re falling in love, but it takes them a little while to catch up.

However classic, even well-trodden this formula is, it feels bracing and fresh in the director’s hands—and at least the first hour of Silver Linings Playbook is pretty much perfect. Things go south a bit when De Niro is called upon to “act.” And frankly these are the only false moments in the film. Otherwise it is all utterly adorable, loaded with fighting, swearing, yelling—well, it IS set in Philly after all. And Bradley Cooper sets the pace.

If Ralph Fiennes had a bit more swagger, naiveté, and heat, he’d be Bradley Cooper. Maybe. But Cooper has all that and more. He and the surprisingly tough, resourceful Lawrence were as smooth and well-matched as Tracy and Hepburn ever were. The scene in which Cooper delivers an hilarious ranting critique of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms—arguing, among other things, that we just don’t need any more unhappy endings—is not only pure cinematic poetry, it’s also the director’s underlying agenda.
Silver Linings Playbook was the best bag of popcorn I’ve enjoyed in a long time.