Arriving in the wake of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation trial, “Not Okay” feels immediately familiar. It opens with a warning that the movie will feature “flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist.”
Zoey Deutch Has Some Nerve
Zoey Deutch (daughter of Lea Thompson, who played Marty McFly’s mom in “Back to the Future”) is making a name for herself as a pretty face who dares to go where most actresses fear to tread: allowing herself to be hugely unlikable. It’s a dangerous area to navigate and a gutsy move to try and pull off, but she traverses this mine field brilliantly.In “Not Okay,” Deutch plays Danni Sanders, a lowly photo editor desperate to become a writer for Depravity, the online magazine she works for. Danni’s editor (Negin Farsad) is highly skeptical and chastises Danni for writing an article about feeling like she missed out on the generational trauma of 9/11, because she was out of the country on vacation. Socially tone deaf and narcissistic doesn’t begin to describe Danni.
Danni’s need for attention is borderline sociopathic. The social ineptness of someone this pretty, trying desperately to insert herself into the conversations of the cooler office cliques and not really registering the high repetition of cold shoulders is highly unlikely. But Deutch makes it work.
Danni’s sick and tired of being a nobody at her job, and she can’t manage to get the attention of her office crush, Colin (Dylan O’Brien), a bleach-blond, tatted, perennially vaping, ebonics-spewing influencer.
What’s a girl to do? To boost her visibility and follower count, she photoshops herself a shiny new life: She’ll soon be jetting to Paris for a writer’s retreat, don’tcha know.
Oops
Now that everyone knows she’s in France, she wakes up to see on the news that terrorist bombings have wreaked massive havoc in the French capital. So Danni doubles down on her deception, going so far as to hide in the airport so she can create a photo-op of herself returning to the good old U.S. of A. Then, she builds an entire fake online persona as a heroic bombing survivor.
But it’s only a matter of time before the world catches Danni working the levers behind the curtains, and she learns the hard way that the internet loves a takedown, again, as recently evidenced in the Depp-Heard trial.
Also, eventually, by way of her web of lies, she gets invited to an exclusive party by Colin. Colin’s a perfect match for her; he’s just as disingenuous, albeit in a slightly less toxic fashion. At one point, he drops his own über-curated personality to confront the one person who’s been wise to both him and Danni from the start. She, an office colleague named Harper (Nadia Alexander), hilariously reminds Colin’s street-talking wannabe-gangsta self that he’s from Maine.
Unlike most female leads in this genre, Danni ends the movie in a much worse place than where she was in the beginning. And while a smidgin of character building, remorse, and regret happens along the way, we’re constantly reminded that her toxic, narcissistic neediness brought this whole mess down upon her head.
Influencer Culture
Deutch deserves kudos for having the courage to portray such an irredeemably morally bankrupt parasite for the majority of the movie’s run time. By the time Danni tries to make amends, nobody wants to hear it. Death threats, memes, and more, turn her life into an eventual living nightmare that was entirely avoidable before she intentionally lit the fuse that blew up and caused the end of her world as she knew it.
And the question hangs there, the entire time, of how much sympathy we should really feel for someone who ultimately destroys their own life by lying and using people.
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