Not Okay is an agonizing hour and 40-some odd minutes of white women showing how much of a problem white women can be. Star/executive producer Zoey Deutch is Danni Sanders, a struggling, wannabe writer — and, of course, a white woman —whose mission to be liked on social media turns her into a viral crusader. And how does she do this, you ask? She pretends to be traumatized by a terrorist attack — something that certain people have done in real life. (Remember when this asshole comic wanted to make amends after admitting he wasn’t anywhere near the Twin Towers on 9/11?) What started as a scheme to impress a vaping, trendsetting co-worker (a wiggerish Dylan O’Brien) — she fakes photos of being in Paris during a writers’ retreat — turns into a full-fledged hoax after a series of bombings in the City of Light, which she has to act like she was in the middle of.
With this bitter, brittle “comedy,” Deutch and writer/director/actress Quinn Shephard set out to show how the desire to be social-media stars is making bland, uninspired people do the shittiest, most despicable things online. But they go about it in a cringey, painful fashion. As played by Deutch — that irresistibly adorkable, Haley Lu Richardson doppelgänger — Danni is immediately established as a terrible person, an attention-craving girl whose desire to sit with the cool kids (in this case, minorities, the LGBTQ community and superficial, culture-vulture influencers) makes her an object of ridicule and resentment among said cool kids.
Though lonely and pitiful and downing Lexapro to cool out her depression, Danni is still a bonafide sociopath. In an effort to make her lies seem accurate, she attends a support group for inspiration, forming a friendship with a shell-shocked, school-shooting victim (Mia Isaac) and picking her brain for ways to be more sympathetic and concerned to the public. Of course, halfway through the movie, particularly after attending an adult kickball game (huh?), Danni starts to realize that the fake-ass poseurs she admires are just that, and people who live real lives are the ones she should be emulating.
Not Okay wants to expose how toxic, hollow and downright horrible social media has become. The problem is, all you have to do is go on social media for a few minutes (Twitter alone can make you consider quitting life and joining a monastery) to see that it’s already doing that quite well. Beating a dead horse with the heaviest of hands, Shephard presents a parable where Deutch’s already-awful protagonist spends most of the movie willfully diving into morally reprehensible chaos for clicks and likes, ultimately coming to the conclusion that leeching off people with actual trauma is, like, wrong.
You gotta respect Deutch and Shephard for at least acknowledging how white folk (mainly white women) need to stop playing the victim, sit in the damage they usually cause, and let other people get a chance at the mic. Shephard even makes a cameo near the end, slamming Deutch’s overprivileged pixie for being another spoiled white girl who thinks it’s all about her. But there is something a bit off about two white women making a movie, distributed by Searchlight Pictures and streaming on Hulu, about how white women steal the spotlight from those who deserve it. 
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“Not Okay” streams Friday on Hulu.
