Zola

 1/4

Starring: Taylour Page, Riley Keough, Nicholas Braun, Colman Domingo

Rated R for Strong Sexual Content and Language Throughout, Graphic Nudity, and Violence including a Sexual Assault

Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.  "Zola" started out as a series of 148 tweets from a Detroit waitress named A'Ziah King, or Zola for short.  Her wild weekend quickly went viral, catching the attention of celebrities such as Missy Elliott and Ava DuVernay and leading to an article in Rolling Stone. Now it's been turned into a movie.

Frankly, I'm not sure what is so compelling about it.  If there was anything catchy or propulsive about it, director Janicza Bravo doesn't find a way to convey it.  This is a creepy and unpleasant story about people I didn't like at all and wanted to get away from.  Watching it isn't being taken on a wile ride.  It's like being trapped in a room with people you don't know who are fighting and doing increasingly dangerous things.

Zola (Page) is a waitress by day and a stripper by night.  One day she meets a fiery woman named Stefani (Keough), and after becoming friends over the course of a single day, Zola agrees to go on a trip with her to Miami to make some big bucks dancing.  Along for the ride are Stefani's long-suffering, dim-witted boyfriend Derreck (Braun) and her roommate whose name she never finds out (Domingo).  What she doesn't know is that Stefani moonlights as a prostitute and her "roommate" is actually her pimp.  And they (or more specifically, he) want to bring her into the fold.

This movie is just all over the place.  Tonally, it veers from comedy to thriller to horror to psychedelic weirdo something.  I'll give points to Bravo for trying to keep the energy up, but the sense of discomfort it generates drowns out anything she was trying to say.  The whole film feels like a bad song played in the wrong key.  The characters are too thin and unpleasant for a drama, the pacing is too sluggish for an adventure flick and the story is too disturbing for a comedy (there are few attempts at humor anyway, and they aren't especially funny).

I'll give credit for the actors, who are quite good under the circumstances.  Taylour Page is adequate as the title character; she gives a performance but is constantly outshone by her co-stars.  Riley Keough continues her streak of choosing movies that waste her considerable talents.  She is a good actress, especially when she plays trashy vixens like Stefani or Krystal from the underrated "American Honey."  But she continues to appear in bad projects.  "Zola" isn't anywhere near as unpleasant as "The Lodge" or "The Devil All the Time," but she deserves better.  Nicholas Braun is fine as the idiot who loves Stefani (one wonders if the feeling is actually mutual).  And Coleman Domingo plays the most vile character of the year.  X (as he is called in the movie) will make your skin crawl.

"Zola" is so sleazy that it makes me want to take a shower to get rid of the stench.  The heroic efforts of the actors only make the experience of watching it worse; if they weren't so good, I might not have cared enough to feel so bad.  But the film's worst sin is that it's boring.

This story was born on Twitter, and it should have stayed there.

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