Zola: Madcap Female Road-Trip Movie Explores Social Media with a Side of Race Relations

By Kim Hughes

Rating: A-

There is a bristling, neon energy to Zola which, given its provenance as a series of real-life tweets from waitress and exotic dancer (and now executive producer) A’ziah “Zola” King, seems about right. This is a road trip movie straight outta weirdsville.

But the film’s twisting storyline, which is unpacked amid the constant thrum and whir of cell phones, reminds us that the surface funhouse aspect of writer/director Janicza Bravo audacious film — which tackles race, sex, and loyalty issues with enormous bluster — are stand-ins for something much bigger.

Things crackle from the start. Outrageous Stefani (Riley Keough) meets our narrator, earnest Zola (Taylour Paige) in a restaurant where she is serving. The attraction is instant, both mentally and physically, though only the former is explored in earnest as the pair reveal both are exotic dancers. A fast friendship ensues.

Stefani immediately invites Zola to join her on a road trip to Florida where, she says, the pair can dance and make easy cash. Zola agrees though it quickly becomes apparent that she should have asked more probing questions before setting off. In short order the women, along with Stefani’s doofus boyfriend Derek (Nicholas Braun) and friend and driver (actually pimp) X, played by Colman Domingo, hit the road.

X parks Derek at a fleabag motel and whisks the women away. There’s dancing but sex work for Stefani soon follows. Zola is not on board with this, but through a series of crazy circumstances (isn’t that always the way?), she proves herself more adept as a pimp than might be imagined, which turns out to be a blessing and a curse as unhinged X sees both women as flesh-and-blood dollar signs that can be easily manipulated through threats.

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The notion of how we communicate today — in elliptical bursts dispensed through once-removed electronic channels — is the thematic thrust of the film, not that director Bravo decelerates the action to conspicuously ponder the point.

She relentlessly pushes things forward at high clip, letting the sleaze of the Sunshine State speak its own peculiar truth. What happens in Zola is the sort of thing you imagine happening after dark when the kids in Sean Baker's The Florida Project have collapsed into heaps.

As noted by the Hollywood Reporter following the film's screening at Sundance: “It also won’t hurt that the movie’s attitudes feel so grounded in the present moment of female-forward narrative. While it’s the story of one woman whose body is commodified by a controlling pimp, the dominant perspective is that of another woman who never surrenders her cool-headed agency. Not for nothing does the real Zola describe herself on Twitter as ‘angry black hottie.’”

Race is one of the film’s sharpest points: Keough’s Stefani talks like a black girl but unabashedly sells herself to johns as a wide-eyed white girl. Sometimes Stefani is mirrored by Zola, sometimes she is countered by Zola. In this context, what is race exactly: what we look like or what we are based on the rhythms of our environment?

Both women are beautiful, smart, and resourceful but more importantly perhaps, they are chameleons shielded behind whatever optic promises the best outcome in a given situation. Endlessly adaptable, they have learned to go with the flow. Therein lies their real power.

There are moments in Zola that are uncomfortable (those depicting scary sex-work situations, for example) but there’s also loads of sly and not-so-sly humour, the latter mostly courtesy of Derek the dumb boyfriend who simply cannot digest Stefani’s total commitment to her way of life despite what she says to placate him.

Add to all this some weirdly incongruous incidental harp music and Zola’s running commentary (at one point supplanted by Stefani’s POV), and the effect is dizzying if occasionally discombobulating, not unlike following Twitter in real time. Point taken.

Zola. Directed by Janicza Bravo. Co-written by Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris. Starring Riley Keough, Taylour Paige, Nicholas Braun, and Colman Domingo. Opens in select theatres nationwide June 30, expanding July 2.