When Chris Rock shows up on screen his new drama, Misty Green — now streaming on Netflix, after just one month in theaters — the wind goes out of the movie’s sails.

It’s the first film Rock has written and directed in 12 years, since the critically-acclaimed 2014 romantic comedy, Top Five, and he assembled a killer cast. Not only does Rosalind Eleazar deliver a star-making performances as a washed-up TV star, but the supporting cast—Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya, Anna Kendrick, Topher Grace—all shine, too, filling in the scenes with vibrant, hilarious color. But when Rock appears as Jordan — a casting director who was once burned by the unreliable Misty Green (Eleazar), who magnanimously offers her another chance — something just feels off. Phony. Inauthentic.

It doesn’t help that Rock, who’s been getting big Hollywood checks since voicing the zebra in 2005’s Madagascar, is sporting a mouthful of blinding white veneers. It’s a constant visual reminder that he is the wrong person to make an effective, compelling film about class struggle. Misty Green‘s on-the-nose observations on the LA housing crisis feel clumsy at best. The movie opens with a compare-and-contrast montage: in one shot, the camera soars over mansions along the coast of Malibu, in the next, babies toddle around a “tent city” homeless encampment.

When Rock delivers his obligatory stand-up bit (about knowing which civil rights movies are bad, based on how much white people like them), Eleazar laughs convincingly, because she’s good at her job. But for those of us in the audience not required to laugh, it just feels like a pale imitation of Rock in his heyday. You’re all too aware that you’re watching Chris Rock, stand-up legend, working out observational comedy material. It certainly doesn’t feel like watching Rock disappear into a character of Jordan, Hollywood movie casting director.

Maybe Rock’s lackluster acting would be easier to forgive if he hadn’t given himself such a large role. But he just keeps showing up. Some of his lines feel so forced, so unnatural (like, for example, a certain racial slur) it gave me second-hand embarrassment to bear witness to it.

It’s too bad. Anna Kendrick kills it as an apsiring trad wife trying to kick her habit of cheating with Black guys. Topher Grace made me laugh every time, with a recurring bit of telling unhoused people he doesn’t have cash. Daniel Kaluuya seems to be in a different, better movie, with his heartbreaking and nuanced portrayal of man fighting his own mind. And Eleazar — previously best known as Louisa on the Apple TV show Slow Horses — delivers a movie star-worthy performance that proves she’s ready for big things. It could have been a very good movie, if only there were less Chris Rock.