“Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” So began a now celebrated 2015 Twitter thread by exotic dancer A’Ziah “Zola” King, detailing a Florida road trip that spirals from stripper sisterhood into a slow-motion car crash. It’s also the jumping-off point for Janicza Bravo’s uproarious movie adaptation of Zola’s 148-tweet social media opus. It’s a blast: a brash, aggressively showy joyride to the dark side. But it’s also that rarest of things: a film inspired by new media that deftly acknowledges the platform on which the story originally played out without becoming enslaved by it.
Language is a living thing. It breaks and remakes itself, takes on by osmosis the cultural influences that flow around it. And likewise, the way we as individuals tell our stories evolves, never more rapidly than in the past decade or so – changes accelerated and magnified by technology. It’s something cinema has frequently failed to adapt to, tending to lag behind swift-moving cultural fluctuations. For every Host – the chilling Zoom horror made during lockdown – there’s a film such as Profile (also released last week), which unfolds entirely on computer screens to gimmicky effect.
What makes this particular adaptation, co-written by Bravo and Jeremy O Harris, sing is the fact that, while it winks at Twitter with a smattering of emojis, it’s the legitimacy of Zola’s voice, rather than the means of its dissemination, which is prioritised. This is crucial, as it soon becomes clear that Zola’s is the only truly authentic voice in the film; other characters adopt accents and switch personas to suit their needs with the same ease that Zola and her fellow dancers swap costumes each night.
Key to bringing Zola truthfully to life is a full-on, fleshed-out performance from Taylour Paige, as magnetic as she is sympathetic as a young woman forced to negotiate a sleazy netherworld populated by dangerous men and their hair-trigger egos. When she meets Stefani (a courageous Riley Keough) there’s an instant connection. Mica Levi’s score (one of the film’s other key assets) is a dreamy, feathery harp refrain, elated and as light as air. Such is the swell of instant kinship that Zola is carried along on the high, agreeing the next day to embark on a working weekend break, dancing the high-paying strip joints of Tampa and partying. Along for the ride is Stefani’s cluelessly gauche boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun), and her roommate, known as X (Colman Domingo, chilling and brilliant), who, we soon learn, is also unhealthily involved in her business interests.
Twenty hours into the road trip down to Florida and the shine is already dulling on the friendship between Zola and Stefani. The latter’s appropriation of Black vernacular fails to conceal the fact that she’s also kind of racist. As Stefani scrolls through her repertoire of toxic stripper anecdotes, Zola barricades herself behind a wall of sarcasm, sporadically firing off a tart put-down. “Were you home-schooled?” she snaps at Derrek at one point. A doofus like Derrek is easy to handle, but X is a different matter. When Zola stands her ground against him, his voice drops in register and takes on a snarling Nigerian accent. Levi’s eloquent score loses its soft airiness and sharpens with brittle electronic edges; the agitated editing shares something of the rattling energy of Sean Baker’s Tangerine. It becomes clear that this road trip is sex trafficking by another name, and Zola’s streetwise sharp wits are her best hope of getting out unscathed.
