Sundance review: 'Zola' is the bat-crap crazy only-in-Florida stripper comedy you've been looking for

‘Zola’

★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 90 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Jan. 25, 12:15 p.m., The Grand (Salt Lake City); Saturday, 11:45 p.m., Egyptian (Park City); Sunday, Jan. 27, 3 p.m., Resort (Sundance); Tuesday, Jan. 29, 11:45 a.m., The Ray (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 8:30 a.m., The MARC (Park City).

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A rapid-fire comedy not for the prudish, director Janicza Bravo’s “Zola” finds caustic humor in what many consider to be the craziest story ever told on Twitter.

In 2015, in 144 tweets, A’ziah “Zola” King told of the time she and a “friend” of hers, Stefani, took time off from their work at a strip club to take a weekend trip to Florida — where, as is all too common for Florida, all kinds of crap went down.

As told here, Zola (Taylour Paige) is a sensible young woman who knows working as a stripper pays better than waitressing — but she has limits, like not doing private shows and not prostituting herself. If only Zola had known, before Stefani (Riley Keough) talked her into going to Florida to dance at some clubs for some fast money, that Stefani did not work under such limitations.

Zola, Stefani, her boyfriend Derek (Nicholas Brand), and a guy (Colman Domingo) whose name Zola would not hear for the first 48 hours of their trip, all pile into an SUV and drive to the Tampa area. While Derek sits at a crappy hotel, the nameless guy takes Zola and Stefani to a nicer hotel — which is when Zola learns that the guy is Stefani’s pimp, and that the guy expects Stefani and Zola to make some money for him. (These scenes have some explicit male nudity, and are not for the squeamish.)

Bravo (who brought the discomfort-centered comedy “Lemon” to Sundance in 2017) and her co-writer, Jeremy O. Harris, spin Zola’s yarn with all the “can you believe this?” immediacy of a good Twitter thread. (The regular tweet sound effects make it feel like the audience is following along to King’s original posts.) Much of Bravo’s humor comes from the larger-than-life characters, and the way the cast captures them — from Domingo’s cold-blooded thug to Brand’s dim bulb hick, and especially Keough’s trailer-trash inflections.

Holding it all together is Paige, who does more with a side-eye glance than most actors do with a sonnet. It’s through Paige’s Zola that we witnesses the increasingly strange antics, and she takes us through the fire and out with charm and wit.