Anora: This year’s Oscars front

Anora, the new movie from the sui generis writer-director Sean Baker ( Tangerine , The Florida Project ), seems likely to be the one that catapults him from indie critical darling to that much rarer thing: a filmmaker whose work is both widely praised by festival-going cinephiles and widely watched by audiences who just want to have a good time. It's a crowd-pleaser, funny and sexy and raucous, while also being startlingly wise and tender.

In the coverage of this movie since its premiere at Cannes (where it won the Palme d'Or), I've seen it described as a screwball comedy, a romantic drama, a road movie, and a pointed treatise on labor and social class. All of those genre classifications apply at one point or another in the course of the film, which is made up of three distinct narrative sections, each with its own rhythm and mood. But what's most impressive is how nimbly the film moves among all of these forms of storytelling without ever losing its footing. From its first frames, Anora drops us into a complete and coherent world that seems to have long preexisted our being there to witness it.

In those first frames, the camera pans along a row of semiprivate booths at a Manhattan strip club, where a lineup of young women gyrate and grind for their male clients. The camera comes to rest on the pretty but hard-to-read face of Ani (Mikey Madison), a sex worker in her 20s (full name: Anora, a fact that will come into play only late in the movie). Ani approaches her job with a buoyant can-do attitude, going out of her way to make anxious customers comfortable as she invites them into the VIP rooms for more-intimate contact, being sure to stop by the ATM along the way.

One night, as she's taking a break, her boss asks Ani to tend to a client who has requested a Russian speaker. As an Uzbek American who grew up in the Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Ani is passably conversant in the language, so she comes out to meet the customer in question, Ivan "Vanya" Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn). Vanya, the spoiled son of an infamous Russian oligarch, looks like no more than a teenager, though he tells Ani he's 21. After their time together in a VIP room (summarized by Vanya in three words: "God bless America"), he asks if Ani is available for appointments outside the club. Next thing she knows, a chauffeured car is delivering her to private encounters at the gated oceanfront mansion where Vanya lives in preposterous luxury, with a full-time cleaning staff and—as will soon become painfully evident—24-hour surveillance by security guards who report back on the regular to Vanya's parents.

The first half-hour or so chronicles Ani and Vanya's whirlwind courtship, uneasily poised between romance and transaction. She agrees to stay with him for a week as a paid pseudo-girlfriend, then finds herself assuming the role for real, charmed by his puppyish affection and inexhaustible horniness. On a party-animal trip to Vegas with a group of friends, the two impulsively tie the knot at a quickie wedding chapel. Once they're back in New York, Ani quits her job, explicitly invoking the Cinderella story as she hugs her fellow strippers goodbye. But her happily-ever-after lasts barely a week. Just as she and Vanya have begun to settle into a cozy if aimless marital life of video games, bong hits, and private dances, three thugs in the employ of Vanya's parents show up at the house and refuse to leave. The Zakharovs, they tell the young couple, have heard about their son's marriage and are insisting it be immediately annulled.

In the long sequence that follows, an exquisitely orchestrated mix of comedy, action, and suspense, Ani resists this interference with all of her considerable physical and moral might. The burly men who have shown up at the door—Armenian American brothers Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and their Russian enforcer Igor (Yura Borisov)—would rather get their job done without using violence, but Ani doesn't let them off so easily. After Vanya flees the scene, she breaks the nose of one of the tough guys and bites another, leading them to restrain and gag her in what could have been a scene of brutal intimidation but, thanks to Ani's fighting spirit, turns into something incongruously farcical.

Without giving away too much, I can say that the relationship among the indomitable Ani and this trio of bumbling musclemen continues to change as they set out on an all-night journey through the bowels of Brighton Beach in search of the vanished Vanya. This chapter of the movie offers a glimpse into a culture that's seldom seen on-screen without overplaying its sociological hand. There's a sense that danger lurks just around the corner of every strobe-lit dance floor or Coney Island candy shop they visit in their travels, but the focus remains on the characters rather than the action.

The movie's final act introduces Vanya's parents (Aleksei Serebryakov and Darya Ekamasova), a Russian power couple far scarier than their Three Stooges–like strongmen. It's in the parents' interactions with Ani that the film makes its sharpest commentary on class relations: For these arrogant billionaires, the idea of their will being thwarted by a mere "prostitute"—a designation Ani furiously rejects—represents an unacceptable disruption of the social order. Ani's one-on-one encounter with Vanya's coolly ruthless mother is both a wrenching interpersonal exchange and a metaphor for the power that global capital wields over the lives of ordinary individuals.

From a craft perspective, Anora is a marvel: Shot on 35 mm film by the cinematographer Drew Daniels ( It Comes at Night , Waves ) and edited by Baker himself, it moves fluidly through a series of indoor and outdoor settings, creating a separate yet coherent visual language for every sequence: music video–style chaos in the hard-partying Vegas scenes, Edward Hopper–esque melancholy in the nighttime journey through Brighton Beach, and, in a shot seen through the plate-glass windows of Vanya's mansion, a contemplative, almost painterly vision of the rocky Long Island coastline under falling snow.

Eydelshteyn, a Russian actor whose delicate bone structure and lanky grace suggest Timothée Chalamet, makes the reckless, immature Vanya into a figure deserving of our pity as well as our contempt. And as the incongruously gentle mobster Igor, Borisov lends the often-scabrous dialogue a slow-burning soulfulness. But it's Mikey Madison's slender shoulders that carry the whole movie. Having played Pamela Adlon's daughter over five seasons of Better Things , along with a Manson follower in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and a major role in the recent reboot of Scream , Madison isn't lacking in experience or high-profile credits, but her performance here marks the arrival of a full-blown movie star. With extraordinary naturalness and intuition, she conveys both Ani's professional worldliness and her still-girlish naïveté. This is no "hooker with a heart of gold" stereotype out of Pretty Woman . Rather, Ani is a sex worker with a core of steel who's keenly aware of her status as potentially exploited labor. At one point she remarks to her strip-club boss that when he starts providing health insurance and a 401(k), he can consider himself entitled to dictate her hours.