Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is a real conundrum of a movie: immersively directed, sensitively acted, and hampered irrevocably by a screenplay that’s absolute toilet paper. Coppola is clearly a talented director (one who, it seems safe to say, comes by it naturally), and she gathers a well-balanced mixture of up-and-comers and established pros to lend support to a leading lady who has, to put it mildly, been under-appreciated as an actor. But the script (by television scribe Kate Gersten, making her feature debut) is a messy soup of well-worn tropes and musty dialogue, and all the bespoke montages in the world can’t paper that over.
It’s not a problem early on. The first act has an off-the-cuff, captured but heightened quality, steeped in small backstage details of a Las Vegas show: high heels clanging on the metal stairs, dressing room gossip, quick-change chaos, snatches of overheard jargon. This is the last of its kind, the final remaining old-school Las Vegas revue, but it’s “a dinosaur,” and the new casino owners are shutting it down in two weeks. This is tough news for Shelly (Pamela Anderson), who has been with the show since 1987. What does she do now? What else can she do? “I don’t even know what I’m gonna do for Christmas,” she despairs.
Her best friend, showgirl-turned-cocktail-waitress Annette (an almost unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis), commiserates. When a younger showgirl asks about retirement, she snorts, “Are you crazy? Bankers retire. It’s not like I have a 401k.” Shelly resorts to ranting in the dressing room about the class and tradition that the show represents, finally granting,“Maybe the times have changed,” and shrugging “se la vie” like she’s trying to convince herself—and failing.

So far, so good. But once the table is set, it goes downhill (and steeply) with the introduction of Hannah (Bille Lourd), a daughter so distant, she doesn’t even call her “mom” anymore. We’ve seen estranged parent/child relationships like this a million times before, and this one is dusty as hell, hampered by trite dialogue (“This was worth missing bedtime for most of my childhood?”) and forced, obvious conflicts. The moment the character is introduced, it’s impossible not to recall The Wrestler—another story of a disreputable performer (played by a tabloid favorite in career rehab mode) coping with aging out of the profession while trying to repair a relationship with an alienated daughter. The Last Showgirl is not burnished by the comparison.
It’s almost saved by the quality of the acting. Dave Bautista is genuinely soulful and affecting as the show’s backstage manager, a grizzled Vegas dead-ender who’s still telling war stories of his days crewing for Siegfried & Roy. It would be easy to make this guy a joke; Bautista wisely chooses to underplay both his good and bad qualities. Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song are stuck in thin roles as the younger showgirls who look to Shelly as a mentor, but they both find moments of grace, and lean into them. Jason Schwartzman only has one scene, but he’s so good in it, so smarmy and real, that the picture all but recalibrates around him. And the tenderness between Anderson and Curtis, which makes her centerpiece scene—a spaced-off casino floor dance to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” intercut with Shelly going through it—not only work, but serve as something of a mission statement for movie that is ultimately about the power of reappropriated kitsch.
And to that end, Anderson is good, if not great; it’s a performance that feels pasted together, saved from going too far over the top by the occasional carefully placed cut. She’s best in the closing scenes, when Shelly is at her rawest, and we sense Anderson peeling away not only the artifice of the script but the line between the character and the actor (or perhaps more accurately, the persona and the person). She does what they can; everyone does. But The Last Showgirl needed major script work early on, when it could have been made over into something fresh and vulnerable, rather than another variation on a tired formula.
C+
“The Last Showgirl” is in theaters Friday.