A notorious tweetstorm arrives onscreen, starring Taylour Paige and Riley Keough.
“Is it as good as the book?” is a question movie critics often hear, whether the book in question is a Harry Potter adventure or something more highbrow. “Is it as good as the tweets?” is a new one, at least for this movie critic, and in the case of “Zola” it opens a surprisingly interesting line of inquiry. Tweets may or may not be literature, but as a storytelling medium Twitter has its own integrity, a rhythm and aesthetic that pose distinctive challenges for film adaptation.
That’s what interested me, anyway. I should also note that this is a movie about strippers.
Directed by Janicza Bravo (“Lemon”) from a script she wrote with the Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”), “Zola” is adapted from a thread that galvanized Twitter back in 2015, when it was somewhat less dominated by expressions of political contempt and moral self-righteousness than it is now. There was more room for crazy stories, and on Oct. 27 of that year, A’Ziah King started posting the profane, hair-raising, occasionally hilarious tale of an ill-starred excursion to Florida that involved sex work, gun play and a highly problematic frenemy. (Her thread became the subject of a Rolling Stone article, which “Zola” also credits as a source.)
“So I met this white bitch at Hooters,” King (who also goes by Zola) wrote in the second tweet. “I was her waitress!” In the movie, the name of the restaurant has been changed, and the customer, called Stefani, is played by Riley Keough with hair extensions and a slightly demented smile. Zola, played with more reserve by Taylour Paige, is charmed by Stefani’s bubbly manner and nonstop patter — heart emojis fly across the screen to affirm their bond — and agrees to an impromptu weekend jaunt to Tampa.
It’s mostly a business trip. Stefani and Zola are both exotic dancers — Zola practices on a pole in the living room of her apartment — lured by the money that supposedly rains down on the strip-club stages of the Sunshine State. For company they have Stefani’s boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun, familiar to “Succession” fans as Cousin Greg), a sweet-natured doofus with a chinstrap beard and a backward baseball cap. Their driver is a man Stefani introduces as her roommate. He switches accents and names — the final credits identify him only as X — and because he’s played by the endlessly inventive and unnervingly charismatic Colman Domingo you may find yourself watching him closely and hoping he’ll be back soon whenever he steps away.
Zola has other reasons for keeping an eye on him, and for wishing him out of her life altogether. Stefani may be unpredictable and not entirely honest, but X, who turns out to be in charge of the weekend’s activities, operates at a whole different level of cunning and menace. He also turns out to be Stefani’s pimp, with a gun-toting girlfriend (Sophie Hall) waiting in Florida. The moneymaking agenda soon switches from stripping to prostitution, and Zola is dismayed to find her services advertised on the internet alongside her friend’s.
She draws a firm boundary, refusing to turn tricks and instead becoming Stefani’s assistant manager and de facto madam — setting the prices, choosing the selfies, greeting the johns and collecting the cash. “Zola” is emphatically not the story of its protagonist’s victimization, even though she is duped, prevented from going home and sometimes threatened with violence. Rather, she is the incredulous witness, the wise narrator and the resilient hero of what might otherwise have been a sad little anecdote.
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Is it more than that? Yes and no. There is something disingenuous about this movie, a refusal to name the stakes it’s playing for, as if the filmmakers aren’t sure how much or what kind of fun they want the audience — or the characters — to have.
Bravo and Harris keep things moving briskly, orchestrating plot turns and digressions in a way that both captures the stop-and-go rhythms of Zola’s experience and replicates the syncopated, splintered attention of Twitter itself. At one point, they pop in an alternative movie-within-the-movie, culled from Reddit, that offers Stefani’s perspective, with Keogh in sober clothes and a chaste ponytail pretending to be the wronged innocent. The sex is conveyed in cinematic shorthand, including a montage of client genitals with appropriate commentary.
The original Twitter thread, laden with exclamation points and smileys, aimed to provoke amazement and incredulity. Wait, what? No way! “Zola,” for all its displays of candor and bravado, both intellectualizes and literalizes what might have happened that weekend, and mutes the blunt poetry of King’s voice. The plot points and images are offered up like term-paper prompts, inviting you to reflect on some of the urgent and fashionable topics of the day: white privilege; cultural appropriation; the male gaze; girl-boss feminism; sexual labor and commodity fetishism under late capitalism; Florida, man.
And maybe also that English-class staple: the unreliable narrator. It’s not that Zola is a liar — we see what she sees, and there’s nobody else here we can trust — so much as that the movie is reluctant to explore her motives and emotions, which has the effect of undermining her credibility. Paige occasionally shows a flicker of fear or a flare of impatience, but the insistence on Zola’s stoical, capable good sense puts other, potentially messier possibilities out of reach. How did she fall for Stefani’s con? Did she want anything from the experience besides money?
Those questions imply judgments, and “Zola,” though it gestures in the direction of satire and Florida noir, lacks a consistent tone or point of view. There is plenty of drama, and some hard feelings — mostly courtesy of Derrek, who is jealous, anxious and altogether pathetic — but not a lot of intrigue or honest emotion. I guess if that’s what you’re after, it’s best to stick to Twitter.
Zola
Rated R. Uh, yeah. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters.
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