Directed by: Lorene Scafaria
Starring: Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez, Keke Palmer, Julia Stiles
Rated R, 110 minutes
As much as has already been said about the Great Recession of 2008, about the shady practices that caused it, the lives it upturned and the companies that collapsed under its weight, little has been said about its effect on one industry in particular: strip clubs. “Hustlers,” a flashy dramatization of a true story of strippers in New York who took matters into their own hands, delves deep to show us this lurid and unexpected consequence of the financial crisis. Half a story of vigilante justice and half a cautionary tale, “Hustlers” chooses not to depict its characters’ actions as unsung heroics, grappling more broadly with the human costs of human indecency.
The movie follows a young stripper named Destiny (Constance Wu, “Crazy Rich Asians”), struggling to make ends meet giving lap dances and private shows at a club in New York City. When a more experienced dancer, Ramona (Jennifer Lopez, “Maid in Manhattan”), takes Destiny under her wing, the tides start to turn, and soon Destiny is thriving. The fun comes to an abrupt end with the onset of the financial crisis, though; as the club’s clientele are largely Wall Street bankers, business dries up, leaving the strippers in dire straits. A few difficult years later, Destiny and Ramona regroup and embark on a daring and unsettling venture: drugging wealthy men, dragging them to the club, and maxing out their credit cards.
Their plan is as risky and unsavory as it sounds, but their actions are framed as justice; as Ramona points out, trying to get Destiny to participate, the money that these men once spent in the club was already stolen money—stolen from hard-working people who didn’t even know their money was being stolen from them until it was too late. And seeing how so few of these crooks were ever punished for their crimes, the prospect of getting even has a special appeal. The argument, as made here, is tempting even while it’s dubious; the movie doesn’t try to convince us that Ramona is in the right, but still convinces us that she believes she is.
Much of the credit for this moral maneuvering is due to Jennifer Lopez, who plays the part of Ramona with a compelling balance of no-nonsense urgency and friendly, even motherly, patience. In one of the best scenes of the movie, Ramona, sensing that Destiny is pulling away from her, takes the younger woman’s hands in her own and softly repeats, “Don’t do that.” It’s a tender moment that feels impossible to coexist with the scheme Ramona is putting together, but Lopez sells the truth of that paradox.
Writer-director Lorene Scafaria (“The Meddler”) generally brings out matching energy from the movie’s other players, from Constance Wu to Keke Palmer (“Scream Queens”) and even the rappers Cardi B and Lizzo, who appear in minor roles. However, Scafaria’s script often lets down the cast, regularly veering into cliché. Sometimes the movie digs its way back with humor—after one money-making flashback goes on too long, Destiny is snapped back into the present day, where she is being interviewed, and dully asks, “Oh, you’re still hung up on the drugging?”—but elsewhere the cheap plot devices and canned dialogue are distracting. As sharp as Lopez’s performance is throughout the movie, even she can’t sell the line “This whole country is a strip club—you’ve got people tossing the money, and people doing the dance.”
Still, taken as a window into the lives affected by the recession, “Hustlers” is a worthy exploration of the consequences of an economic system that leaves everybody desperate. In the most uncomfortable scene of the movie, Destiny, still dressed in her nightclub outfit and smeared with blood from a late-night house call gone awry, walks her young daughter up to the door of her school, trying to ignore the looks from other parents dropping off their kids. This, the movie says, is the human cost of tough-luck economics, the sad product of a Rube Goldberg machine of greed that deposits suffering on those at the bottom. These moments of silent shame and alienation are easy to ignore, but “Hustlers” makes us look closely, past the spectacle and allure of its strip club setting, and then, suddenly, it looks right back at us.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 9/20/19.