Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers immediately announces that it’s going to be as flashy as its fur-draped, jewel-bedecked protagonists, with an extended single take set to Janet Jackson’s “Control.” “This is a story about control,” Jackson tells us, as we follow Dorothy (Constance Wu), known professionally as Destiny, from a hectic strip-club dressing room out onto the stage, where, along with a line of other women, she’s presented to potential lap-dance recipients. The assertiveness of the film’s opening long take contrasts with Dorothy’s relative timidity at this point; as we’ll come to see, she hasn’t fully adapted to survival at Moves, the high-end but still very skeezy strip club where she works. Soon, both character and camera are stopped dead, transfixed by the act that follows the parade of lap-dancers: Ramona Vega (Jennifer Lopez), veteran Moves stripper and the film’s true center.
Ramona performs a rousing pole dance to the unexpected—but, as it turns out, entirely fitting—“Criminal,” contorting her body around the steel beam in rhythm to a bass-heavy version of Fiona Apple’s elusively sexy bad-girl lament. It’s a scene destined to be the film’s most memorable, given how overdetermined the enjoyment of pole dancing is today as both erotic spectacle and athletic performance, and given the way the scene calls attention to the physical prowess of its superstar actor. One can’t help but watch it with a kind of dual consciousness: On the one hand, there’s Ramona, Dorothy’s idol and de facto sovereign of Moves, and on the other, there’s Lopez, a 50-year-old pop icon and sex symbol, whose agile defiance of preconceptions about age, beauty, and fitness is crafted to elicit vicarious thrills.
It makes sense, then, that we don’t see another spectacular pole-dance performance from Lopez again in the film, as from this point, despite its playful approach to narrative form, Hustlers would prefer that we see her only as her character—with the exception, perhaps, of a shot of her reclining in a fur coat and one-piece that unmistakably brings the “Jenny on the Block” video to mind. The seasoned exploiter of horny men takes Dorothy under her wing, teaching her how to pole dance (the viewer is left to ponder how Dorothy got a job at a Manhattan strip club without knowing even the basics of pole dancing), and educating the Queens native about strategies for earning maximum tips from Wall Street slimeballs.
It’s 2007 and the time is ripe for dancers who service the privileged bros trading unregulated derivatives, and with Ramona’s help, Dorothy finds herself able not only to pay back the debts of her beloved grandmother (Wai Ching Ho), but also appropriate some of the wealth-signifiers of the decadent 1% she serves, like a monstrous 2008 Escalade. Scafaria accentuates this accumulation of wealth and agency in the runup to the 2008 financial crisis with no shortage of musical montages and slow-motion shots of Dorothy and Ramona striding through the club. The film dwells in the sensorial excess of high-end stripping, but also in the camaraderie that blooms between Dorothy, Ramona, and the other women at the club (a supporting cast that includes Trace Lysette, Mette Towley, Lizzo, and Cardi B as, essentially, herself).
Dorothy’s voiceover is justified by a frame narrative, in which she recounts the tale of these heady times to a journalist, Elizabeth (Julia Stiles). The film relies on this framing device for act breaks and foreshadowing, as when Dorothy makes the ominous, if somewhat incongruous, pronouncement that “Ramona wasn’t in it to make friends, she just did, but she was always in control.” The structure of the frame narrative leads Hustlers into some unnecessarily convoluted formulations, as the plot fast-forwards through the recession and later catches up with Ramona’s activities between 2008 and 2011 in flashback—a flashback embedded within a flashback that feels like extraneous stylistic flair. It’s one of many sequences in which Ramona usurps the authorial voice in the film, as if the force of her personality had pushed Dorothy out of the way. Scarfaia is clearly more interested in the strength and charisma of Lopez’s ambitious, alluring dancer than in her neophyte main character.
It’s after the financial crash that the titular hustle begins, with Ramona recruiting Dorothy, now the mother of a toddler, and two fellow dancers, Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart), to help her drug men, cart them back to the club, and coerce them into handing over their credit cards. The cons that follow are presented with a vibrant sense of humor, relishing the way the women take advantage of the men’s oblivious horniness, their defenses lowered by the women’s nakedly performed obsequiousness. Recurring punchlines around Annabelle’s compulsive nervous vomiting and Mercedes’s ambivalence about her prison-bound boyfriend (“3-5 years is a serious commitment,” she says at one point) serve to lighten the mood around their commission of rather serious crimes.
Hustlers takes the intense bonds formed between the women in these unlikely circumstances as its driving theme. The film is remarkable for capturing a brewing conflict between women while also celebrating their connection, avoiding the trap of styling an argument between strippers as a petty catfight. This is true even if the dialogue sometimes falls back on repetitive proclamations about the group of nascent felons being a “family” or “real sisters,” and if the editing relies too much on pop-music montages that also grow repetitive (surprisingly, though, the soundtrack features more Chopin than it does comeback-era Britney). The film proves to be a fun parable of Great Recession survival, its barely submerged subtext being the communal strength of women of color, the population most affected by the crash.
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