You Don’t Nomi: Doc of Kitsch Classic Showgirls Shows What Legacies Look Like

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B

File the new documentary You Don’t Nomi under delightful diversion of the NSFW variety.

Like its source material — the ultra-trashy 1995 bomb-cum-cult hit — the film is oddly beguiling, casting a wide thematic net and touching on Showgirls’ unlikely but undeniable legacy and the surprisingly positive blowback on its once derided cast.

A scene from the stage production of Showgirls! The Musical! featured in You Don’t Nomi.

With its first half a kind of post-mortem of this so-called accidental masterpiece and the second devoted to its cultural influence on everyone from drag queens to film scholars, You Don’t Nomi — its title a snappy riff on lead character Elizabeth Berkley’s name — is impressive for its breadth and depth.

Early scenes showing a bushy-tailed Berkley on the promo trail plugging the then-unseen (and soon-to-be critically slaughtered) film come off as positively quaint, and provide a counterpoint to her role years later as the savvy, good-natured ambassador for Showgirls as it morphed into a camp classic.

Ditto director Paul Verhoeven, who is gamely shown accepting a Razzie “award” for his film but also exploring his story’s subtler ramifications. Toronto film critic Adam Nayman, who literally wrote the book on Showgirls (see his It Doesn't Suck: Showgirls) offers analysis and arguments for the film’s place in the canon, managing, perhaps improbably, to position it somewhere between Cecil B. DeMille and Busby Berkeley.

American critic Barbara Shulgasser-Parker offers a contrarian take but, as is pointed out repeatedly in You Don’t Nomi, it is fascinating that a film so disparaged on delivery remains resonant decades later while many of its better-received contemporaries are largely forgotten. Certainly, no one in 2019 is holding boisterous, star-studded SRO screenings for Get Shorty or Leaving Las Vegas, to name two critical hits also from 1995.

Indeed, the doc positions Showgirls in that rarified space also occupied by Mommie Dearest and Valley of the Dolls: films so inexplicably, overwhelmingly, stubbornly bad that they end up being exceedingly watchable for all sorts of reasons, though none that were likely in the imaginations of their creators at the time.

You Don’t Nomi gives Verhoeven’s place in cinema history a deep and interesting regard and, to a lesser extent, explores the motivations of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas as well as the stakes for Berkley, which were enormously high at the time given her image as an aw-shucks TV star (see Saved by the Bell) and the fact that, despite the presence of vets like Kyle MacLachlan and Gina Gershon, she and her frequently exposed breasts pretty much carried the movie.

Of course, how one feels about Showgirls will determine who wants to devote an additional 90 minutes to dissecting it. After all, it is fucking Showgirls with its inane/awesome dog food-eating references and howling massacre of the name Versace. And revisionist history is just that. But yes, admittedly, fans of the original will have a ball.

You Don't Nomi. Directed by Jeffrey McHale. With Elizabeth Berkley, Joe Eszterhas, Gina Gershon, Adam Nayman, and Haley Mlotek. Available June 16 on VOD.