Share my pain
Not Okay, the Hulu-based sophomore effort from actress-writer-director Quinn Shephard, opens with a much-discussed “content warning” that the film we are about to experience contains “flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist.” It’s a tweak of the viewer’s nose intended to set a cheeky tone and make some kind of statement about the sort of protagonists one usually sees in satires and black comedies about the times we live in. Fortunately and unfortunately, it sets the stage perfectly for everything to come. Not Okay’s contempt for its main character, wannabe writer Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch) is trumped only by its contempt for its audience. This is a movie convinced not only that it’s saying Big and Important Things, but that you won’t understand those Big and Important Things unless they are screamed directly into your ear through a megaphone at a rally, “friendly reminder” style.
Not Okay fancies itself a biting satirical statement on, well, a number of things. Instagram influencer culture. Privileged white women. The mental health of young people. The monetization of trauma and suffering, which seems to be the hot new message to put in your message movies. It’s ineffective at satirizing any of these things because good satire must come from a place of both understanding and bravery about the subject matter. Not Okay has no interest in understanding. It asks no questions; it admits no complexity to its world; it leaves viewers with nothing to contemplate or wonder. It inhabits a world of dunks and drags and yasss queens, and its concern is making sure we hear all its own dunks and drags. We’ll get to its lack of courage in due time.
After that bizarre content warning, we hear a generic voiceover from Deutch about finding purpose and meaning in your life. The voiceover plays over a montage of unexplained Internet-based abuse directed towards Danni, intercut with shots of her staring at her computer and weeping. The rest of the film will flesh out the story of how Danni became the InstaTwit celebrity of the moment. The short, spoiler version: Lonely, desperate, depressed, and stagnant alt-weekly photo editor Danni wants to write for the twentysomething-focused alt-weekly where she works, but she has two problems. She’s not a great writer, and “unlikable” doesn’t even begin to cover what an utterly wretched, shallow, soulless gargoyle she is. She has a TikTok video where her brain should be. In the movie’s funniest scene, magazine editor Susan (Negin Farsad) critiques a piece Danni has submitted to her by telling her that we don’t usually try to encourage “FOMO for 9/11.” So her dreams of writing and becoming Internet-famous remain in limbo.
To impress Colin (Dylan O’Brien), an Eminem impersonator who has confused Eminem with Justin Timberlake…sorry, an “influencer” who works at the magazine, Danni pretends that she’s going on a writer’s retreat in Paris, and posts a bunch of fake photos on her social media accounts. One of those doctored photos is of her selfie-ing it up at the Arc de Triomphe, timestamped five minutes before terrorists set off a bomb there. Suddenly, Danni is a survivor of tragedy, and now everyone cares about her and wants to hear what she has to say. She likes the attention, and she decided to roll with it.
There are two ways this could have worked. The first would be to treat Danni with compassion - to show us how she became the way she is, and show us in detail the forces that convinced her that she would only be loved or admired if she did such a crappy thing. The second would be to fully embrace the horrorshow that is Danni, make her a full-on villain protagonist, and let her dig her well-manicured claws into everyone around her until they bleed. Not Okay wants to take the second approach, but repeatedly chickens out, because it’s terrified we might not get its very important message if it doesn’t spell it out for us on a big old protest sign. Here to bear that protest sign is Danni’s new friend, school shooting survivor and activist Rowan Aldren (Mia Isaac), whose job is to uncomfortably poke at Danni’s (and the audience’s) conscience as Danni freeloads off Rowan’s courage and large social media following. Whenever Rowan is onscreen, we can be sure that the movie will lose its comedic sensibility and descend into exactly the kind of trauma porn it’s pretending to critique.
It doesn’t help that, in addition to Danni and with the exception of Rowan, every other major character is also a viperish mean girl. Take Harper (Nadia Alexander), Danni’s rival at the magazine who exposes her fraud. We’re supposed to sympathize with Harper, because Harper is an actual talented writer who admires Ruth Bader Ginsburg and gives Danni a rousing “reason you suck” speech when the latter’s deception comes crashing down. But Harper flat-out admits that she goes after Danni mainly due to jealousy, and outside of that, Harper’s main jobs have been scowling and delivering Twittery insults at Danni’s manicure. Is this part of Shephard’s satire - that the poisonous culture of Internet fame and trauma porn gets its claws into everyone? Perhaps, but it doesn’t work, because Not Okay is afraid to fully embrace how repulsive these people are. Harper has to interrupt her own revenge monologue to tearfully remind us that people died!
On the flip side, Shephard also misses every opportunity to make Rowan into a fleshed-out human being. Instead, Rowan is a collection of stereotypes about Zoomers and activists with a generous sprinkling of saintliness added in. Her trauma sits in the gaping hole where her personality should be. She exists to be traumatized. Here, by making Rowan a symbol instead of a person, Shephard has fallen elegantly into a trap of her own making: she’s using Rowan for her own ends too, all the way up to when Rowan performs a poem about Danni and gets a standing ovation. Rowan’s presence lets Not Okay pat itself on the back for amplifying the voice of the unheard, never noticing or caring that it won’t let her be anything else.
Shephard also seems all too eager to use her film for tiresome self-flagellation. She literally puts herself in the film so that she can call Danni a “privileged white girl” and then poutily reflect on how she is also describing herself. Near the end of the movie, a snide reference is made to “people like [Danni] getting movies on Netflix and Hulu,” and all I can say to that is, you didn’t have to make the movie. (Yes, I do understand that it’s meant to be ironic, and no, that doesn’t make it better.) We understand that you are well versed in the etiquette of Tumblr. Now say something worth saying, for God’s sake.
Half-baked as it is, though, Not Okay is not a badly made film. It’s never boring. I spent the entire runtime quite active in my hatred for it. For all the crap I’ve given her, Shephard absolutely understands the workings of social media, and she transports them to film to great effect. She and editor Mollie Goldstein set the pace at a quick and uneven clip, effectively mimicking the drip-drip-pour of a social media feed during a Big Moment. The set is tinged with bright, strikingly artificial colors, mirrored in Danni’s penchant for clownish eyeshadow. The obnoxiously perky score by Pierre-Phillippe Côté completes the feeling of a story taking place in a version of the Internet that has leaked into the real world. In the cast, Embeth Davidtz and Brennan Brown are cringey delights as Danni’s smothering parents. And Mia Isaac establishes herself as someone to watch in the future, bringing layers of sadness, joy, and humanity to Rowan that don’t exist in the script. It’s just so unfortunate that they’ve deployed all this talent in service to such an insipid story.
The Internet chatter about Not Okay has made much of its similarities to the musical Dear Evan Hansen. More favorable reviews of the film have described it along the lines of “Dear Evan Hansen if it knew its main character was a total d-bag.” But Dear Evan Hansen resonated with people because it was fundamentally about messy, ugly, complicated feelings. Not Okay doesn’t like it when things are messy or complicated, and that dislike hinders it at every turn. There are enough gears turning here that I’m interested in seeing more of Quinn Shephard’s work once she matures as a writer or directs someone else’s script. Not Okay, however, will be as meaningless as last year’s trending hashtag once its moment expires.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies - mostly bad, occasionally good - in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There's a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.
Not Okay fancies itself a biting satirical statement on, well, a number of things. Instagram influencer culture. Privileged white women. The mental health of young people. The monetization of trauma and suffering, which seems to be the hot new message to put in your message movies. It’s ineffective at satirizing any of these things because good satire must come from a place of both understanding and bravery about the subject matter. Not Okay has no interest in understanding. It asks no questions; it admits no complexity to its world; it leaves viewers with nothing to contemplate or wonder. It inhabits a world of dunks and drags and yasss queens, and its concern is making sure we hear all its own dunks and drags. We’ll get to its lack of courage in due time.
After that bizarre content warning, we hear a generic voiceover from Deutch about finding purpose and meaning in your life. The voiceover plays over a montage of unexplained Internet-based abuse directed towards Danni, intercut with shots of her staring at her computer and weeping. The rest of the film will flesh out the story of how Danni became the InstaTwit celebrity of the moment. The short, spoiler version: Lonely, desperate, depressed, and stagnant alt-weekly photo editor Danni wants to write for the twentysomething-focused alt-weekly where she works, but she has two problems. She’s not a great writer, and “unlikable” doesn’t even begin to cover what an utterly wretched, shallow, soulless gargoyle she is. She has a TikTok video where her brain should be. In the movie’s funniest scene, magazine editor Susan (Negin Farsad) critiques a piece Danni has submitted to her by telling her that we don’t usually try to encourage “FOMO for 9/11.” So her dreams of writing and becoming Internet-famous remain in limbo.
To impress Colin (Dylan O’Brien), an Eminem impersonator who has confused Eminem with Justin Timberlake…sorry, an “influencer” who works at the magazine, Danni pretends that she’s going on a writer’s retreat in Paris, and posts a bunch of fake photos on her social media accounts. One of those doctored photos is of her selfie-ing it up at the Arc de Triomphe, timestamped five minutes before terrorists set off a bomb there. Suddenly, Danni is a survivor of tragedy, and now everyone cares about her and wants to hear what she has to say. She likes the attention, and she decided to roll with it.
There are two ways this could have worked. The first would be to treat Danni with compassion - to show us how she became the way she is, and show us in detail the forces that convinced her that she would only be loved or admired if she did such a crappy thing. The second would be to fully embrace the horrorshow that is Danni, make her a full-on villain protagonist, and let her dig her well-manicured claws into everyone around her until they bleed. Not Okay wants to take the second approach, but repeatedly chickens out, because it’s terrified we might not get its very important message if it doesn’t spell it out for us on a big old protest sign. Here to bear that protest sign is Danni’s new friend, school shooting survivor and activist Rowan Aldren (Mia Isaac), whose job is to uncomfortably poke at Danni’s (and the audience’s) conscience as Danni freeloads off Rowan’s courage and large social media following. Whenever Rowan is onscreen, we can be sure that the movie will lose its comedic sensibility and descend into exactly the kind of trauma porn it’s pretending to critique.
It doesn’t help that, in addition to Danni and with the exception of Rowan, every other major character is also a viperish mean girl. Take Harper (Nadia Alexander), Danni’s rival at the magazine who exposes her fraud. We’re supposed to sympathize with Harper, because Harper is an actual talented writer who admires Ruth Bader Ginsburg and gives Danni a rousing “reason you suck” speech when the latter’s deception comes crashing down. But Harper flat-out admits that she goes after Danni mainly due to jealousy, and outside of that, Harper’s main jobs have been scowling and delivering Twittery insults at Danni’s manicure. Is this part of Shephard’s satire - that the poisonous culture of Internet fame and trauma porn gets its claws into everyone? Perhaps, but it doesn’t work, because Not Okay is afraid to fully embrace how repulsive these people are. Harper has to interrupt her own revenge monologue to tearfully remind us that people died!
On the flip side, Shephard also misses every opportunity to make Rowan into a fleshed-out human being. Instead, Rowan is a collection of stereotypes about Zoomers and activists with a generous sprinkling of saintliness added in. Her trauma sits in the gaping hole where her personality should be. She exists to be traumatized. Here, by making Rowan a symbol instead of a person, Shephard has fallen elegantly into a trap of her own making: she’s using Rowan for her own ends too, all the way up to when Rowan performs a poem about Danni and gets a standing ovation. Rowan’s presence lets Not Okay pat itself on the back for amplifying the voice of the unheard, never noticing or caring that it won’t let her be anything else.
Shephard also seems all too eager to use her film for tiresome self-flagellation. She literally puts herself in the film so that she can call Danni a “privileged white girl” and then poutily reflect on how she is also describing herself. Near the end of the movie, a snide reference is made to “people like [Danni] getting movies on Netflix and Hulu,” and all I can say to that is, you didn’t have to make the movie. (Yes, I do understand that it’s meant to be ironic, and no, that doesn’t make it better.) We understand that you are well versed in the etiquette of Tumblr. Now say something worth saying, for God’s sake.
Half-baked as it is, though, Not Okay is not a badly made film. It’s never boring. I spent the entire runtime quite active in my hatred for it. For all the crap I’ve given her, Shephard absolutely understands the workings of social media, and she transports them to film to great effect. She and editor Mollie Goldstein set the pace at a quick and uneven clip, effectively mimicking the drip-drip-pour of a social media feed during a Big Moment. The set is tinged with bright, strikingly artificial colors, mirrored in Danni’s penchant for clownish eyeshadow. The obnoxiously perky score by Pierre-Phillippe Côté completes the feeling of a story taking place in a version of the Internet that has leaked into the real world. In the cast, Embeth Davidtz and Brennan Brown are cringey delights as Danni’s smothering parents. And Mia Isaac establishes herself as someone to watch in the future, bringing layers of sadness, joy, and humanity to Rowan that don’t exist in the script. It’s just so unfortunate that they’ve deployed all this talent in service to such an insipid story.
The Internet chatter about Not Okay has made much of its similarities to the musical Dear Evan Hansen. More favorable reviews of the film have described it along the lines of “Dear Evan Hansen if it knew its main character was a total d-bag.” But Dear Evan Hansen resonated with people because it was fundamentally about messy, ugly, complicated feelings. Not Okay doesn’t like it when things are messy or complicated, and that dislike hinders it at every turn. There are enough gears turning here that I’m interested in seeing more of Quinn Shephard’s work once she matures as a writer or directs someone else’s script. Not Okay, however, will be as meaningless as last year’s trending hashtag once its moment expires.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies - mostly bad, occasionally good - in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There's a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.
