Just a day after Allison Janney and Bryan Cranston—two of our all-time great television actors—appeared together as presenters at the 2025 Tony Awards, reminding one and all of their Broadway bona fides too (Janney is a two-time Tony nominee, last gracing the Main Stem as Violet Newstead in 9 to 5 in 2009, while Cranston’s performance as Howard Beale in Network won him his second Tony in 2019), the pair showed up at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center for the world-premiere screening of their theater-y new movie, Everything’s Going to Be Great, during the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival.
Loosely based on how screenwriter Steven Rogers (I, Tonya) grew up, Everything’s Going to Be Great follows the Smart family: mustachioed paterfamilias Buddy (Cranston), a tirelessly optimistic producer of middling regional theater; his long-suffering bookkeeper wife, Macy (Janney); their hunky elder son, Derrick (Jack Champion), whose primary ambitions are to lose his virginity and play football; and his theatrical younger brother, Les (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), who has an easier time communing with the ghosts of Noël Coward, Ruth Gordon, and Tallulah Bankhead than with any fellow 14-year-olds.
Broadly speaking, it’s a film about faith—its virtues and, possibly more crucially, its hazards—as well as sacrifice, belonging, self-discovery, and family. (As Macy’s grizzled older brother, Walter, Chris Cooper is a sneaky heartbreaker.)
The latter theme would also wend its way throughout Monday’s premiere, first cropping up before the film had even begun: during his introductory remarks, director Jon S. Baird asked the audience to wish his 89-year-old mother, Elsa—who was too sick to travel from Scotland for the screening—a speedy recovery. Then, during the talkback, Rogers recalled being “in a play before I ever saw a play,” given his own father’s work in local theater; Janney shared that when, early on, her character’s name had to be changed from Twyla for mysterious legal reasons, she asked if it could be Macy, to honor Janney’s late mother (a former actress in her own right); and Cranston reflected on the similarities between Buddy and his own father: “He had this aspirational quality to a fault… and it did create some turmoil in my childhood.”
Yet the power of art—and the strength of the love that creatives must have for it in order to make a living—was another through-line. Everything’s Going to Be Great is not, strictly speaking, a happy story; the lengths that Buddy goes to for his work verge on the pathological before tipping over into the actually dangerous.
Of course, in the wake of a Broadway season crammed with pie-in-the-sky passion projects—from Oh, Mary! to Maybe Happy Ending and Just in Time—the difference between drive and delusion is not at all obvious. Yet reflecting on the relationship between Buddy and Macy—their trials and frustrations leavened by family sing-alongs to the scores of A Chorus Line and The Pirates of Penzance—Cranston put the work of being a performing artist into plainer terms: “I mean, to me, to have a career in this business, you need to fall in love.”