A popular internet stat holds that the residents of this distracted globe send a combined 200 billion tweets per year. Hollywood’s scribes, meanwhile, struggle to compose half a dozen annual scripts unconnected to comic books, theme park rides, or other bone-weary forms of preexisting intellectual property. If, as its distributors allege, the new picture by writer-director Janicza Bravo (Lemon) is the first movie to be adapted from a viral Twitter thread, then all involved deserve applause for opening up an auspicious filmmaking frontier. Given the dearth of other ideas, they are unlikely to be the last artists to explore the new realm’s bounties.
A perfectly paced exercise in comic depravity, Zola tells the story of Aziah “Zola” King (Taylour Paige), a part-time stripper who waits tables in between stints on the pole. Trudging through a red-eyed shift in a Detroit diner, Zola serves an outgoing fellow dancer named Stefani (Riley Keough) and strikes up a provisional friendship. As often happens when a surfeit of time meets a lack of prospects, the two women hatch a scheme designed to enrich themselves with minimal effort. (Does unhooking one’s brassiere count as “work?”) Stefani, accompanied by her boyfriend and roommate, is off to Tampa to find a wealthier class of club and patron. Zola, who clearly has nothing better to do, should join her.
