Top Five review: Chris Rock dazzles in full meta jacket

The winner of this year’s Toronto audience award isn’t announced until the weekend. But buzz is that it might just match what’s already the runaway victor in the sales stakes. Chris Rock’s comedy was snapped up earlier this week by Paramount for $12m, with a further commitment to spend $20m on marketing. By contrast, last year’s biggest, Begin Again, was bought by the Weinsteins for $7m (with equivalent on promo). Why such extravagance? Well, it’s a good punt: Top Five is a film broad and filthy enough for multiplex appeal, but also sufficiently arch to satisfy those who fancy themselves a little more sophisticated.

A snappier spin on Funny People, in which Adam Sandler played a disillusioned comedian diagnosed with cancer, Rock stars as Andre Allen, an Eddie Murphy figure with roots in standup, millions in the bank thanks to some dumb franchises, and a hunger to haul himself out of the low-brow. We see clips of his work: Hammy – and its sequels - in which he plays a bear cop who opens fire yelling catchphrase “It’s Hammy time!”; as well as his first serious movie, Uprize, about the Haitian slave rebellion. He tries to flog the latter on the junket circuit, but all anybody wants to discuss is his upcoming marriage to a reality TV star, in a ceremony that’s to be a special on Bravo. This commitment means Andre is not only tagged by camera crews, but by a reporter from the New York Times, with whom he’s agreed to do a profile, despite their critic consistently trashing his back catalogue.

This reporter is played by Rosario Dawson, making the most of a peach of a part that’s miles richer than it needed to be. What might have been just a good-looking sounding board is actually Diane Keaton (or maybe Tony Roberts) to Rock’s Woody Allen; Julie Delpy to his Ethan Hawke. Or, even, his Chris Rock – as the two stroll round the streets of Manhattan, swapping stories and riffing on pop culture, Top Five irresistibly recalls 2 Days in New York, Rock’s 2012 romance with Delpy. There’s a loose-limbed ease here that’s as inclusive as it is in-jokey; never more so than when Andre returns home to chat with friends and family (including Tracy Morgan, Anders Holm and JB Smoove).

These scenes also remind you of Rock’s 2009 documentary Good Hair; this is his third fiction film as director and writer as well as star, and the undeniable vanity that fuels it feels fitting for the material. In fact, if anything, Rock overindulges his friends at the movie’s expense. A flashback involving Cedric the Entertainer wears thin and never resolves with the hilarity you’re hoping for (though one shot, of a postcoital bed, raises some of the biggest – and most revolted – laughs of the festival). A few threads, especially that involving Dawson’s boyfriend, feel like punchline setups rather than plausible plots.

Still, there’s something so winning about Rock’s ramble round the fringes of fame that you let it go – even niggling details such as the fact Dawson has her editor programmed into her phone under “Editor”, rather than under, say, their name. Like so many films at this year’s festival, Top Five mines the zeitgeist. Luckily, as with While We’re Young, it does so with humour and a light touch – though it’s a much soppier prospect than Baumbach’s movie. Cameos from Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld and Whoopi Goldberg push envelopes generally kept on the top shelf. Let’s hope Top Five serves to make Rock as well-known – in the UK, in particular – as those three.