‘Not Okay’ Review: A Sometimes Funny but Contrived Satire of Influencer Culture

Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch), the socially awkward, narcissistic protagonist of Quinn Shepherd’s Not Okay, craves attention in all the wrong ways. A photo editor at a hip online magazine in New York City, Danni aspires to be a writer, but her article pitches to her exasperated boss, Susan (Negin Farsad)—including one about having FOMO about 9/11 because she didn’t know any of the victims—are only revealing of her cluelessness and tone-deafness. She is the epitome of those who try to skate by on their looks and privilege.

Overly eager to get in with the LGBTQ crowd at work, Danni tries to weasel her way into queer bowling night, despite the fact that her co-workers—especially one of the magazine’s ambitious writers, Harper (Nadia Alexander)—see the desperation and neediness that barely mask her perpetual cheeriness. At one of her lowest ebbs, Danni gets stoned with the office hottie, a travel blogger named Colin (Dylan O’Brien), after running into him on the street, only for him to immediately forget her name and leave her stranded.

One could feel pity for Danni’s social flailing, but as per the faux warning that opens the film, she’s “an unlikeable female protagonist.” And that would be perfectly fine if she were a particularly interesting one as well, or if her character’s trajectory felt remotely organic rather than entirely determined by the whims of where Shepherd’s social satire needs it to go.

Danni’s rapid rise to social media fame, which comes about when the trip to Paris that she fakes on her Instagram happens at the same time as a series of terror attacks in the City of Love, is initially quite funny. Not Okay doesn’t make any points that, now over a decade into the ubiquity of social media, aren’t painfully obvious. But Shepherd successfully mines humor from Danni’s willingness to falsely accept all of the unearned praise and sympathy that she engenders following the attacks, including from those who once scorned or ignored her, believing that their kindness toward her is the only socially acceptable response.

After Danni comes into the orbit of Rowan (Mia Isaac)—a famous, outspoken survivor of a school shooting—at a trauma therapy meeting that she’s forced to attend, the film takes a turn toward the serious. The stabs at more far-reaching statements about American culture feel more than a bit preachy, and as Danni works her way into Rowan’s good graces, she rapidly begins to evince the intelligence and thoughtfulness that you would never think believe she were capable of in the first place. While she initially uses Rowan as a springboard to her own rise in social media cache, Danni suddenly grows a conscience and realizes the errors of her ways. And, of course, she does so just as her string of lies come crashing down around her.

Not Okay mercifully stops short of giving Danni a redemption arc—a fact that’s acknowledged, and with obnoxious self-referentiality, in one of the film’s chapter titles. But while Danni remains the script’s object of scorn, she still goes down the same predictable path as so many other ditzy, selfish white girls before her. By the end, we may know that Danni’s relationships with just about everyone is shattered, but because she’s hyper-aware of her flaws and has grown as a person, we also know that, in the long run, she will undoubtedly be okay.