The Porn Star And The Curmudgeon: Starlet
by Elina Mishuris
Starlet
Directed by Sean Baker
Jane has a job, a dog, and a pair of stoner roommates—just like you! When she finds $10,000 inside a thermos she picked up at an LA yard sale, she is—as you would be—elated, and a bit conflicted. It’s likely you aren’t also a budding adult film star like Jane, but her conundrum is familiar: what should she do with the money? And with the curmudgeonly Sadie, who unknowingly bestowed upon her such largesse? (Sadie seems a very content misanthrope and Jane’s most cherished companion is her Chihuahua Starlet.) Perhaps you’ve seen this before?
In his last feature, Prince of Broadway, director Sean Baker dropped a baby into the life of a charismatic Manhattan man hustling bootleg purses, at which point he did not get his act together or turn his life around, because Baker isn’t interested in insulting your intelligence—or his characters’. Jane (Dree Hemingway) is in porn, but unlike her vicious friend Melissa (Stella Maeve), she takes her work seriously—she's a professional—and she takes befriending Sadie seriously as well, even when the threatened lady maces her. Of course with Jane, seriousness is the slight intensification of a floating vacancy; she’s sweet, at times—somehow beatific in the middle of a hardcore shoot—just as the widowed Sadie (Besedka Johnson) is sandpapery gruff.
In their loose-limbed, overexposed California, the old formula in which Shirley Temple thawed the hearts of geezers no longer holds us in thrall nor Baker in allegiance, leaving the director free to try something else. Which is to say, this shtick is new, if not always effective; it’s not hard to read this plot, even if the constants are different. Where Baker unquestionably succeeds is in directing his actors, or not directing them. While interviewed, Hemingway pulls at her arms, chews cuticles, laughs in her throat and leaves halting sentences… unfinished… Just like Jane. It’s an open question whether Starlet is by nature camera-shy. Happily Starlet isn’t.
Opens November 9
