‘Anora’ Review: A Pretty Woman From Brooklyn

Sometimes a movie actually earns the old cliché of a “star-making turn,” and I’m here to say that Sean Baker’s “Anora” is this year’s star maker. I’ve seen it twice, and both times I left the theater on a high, exhilarated by the performances, the rhythm, the emotional shape of it. The only question that remains — and it’s a great one to have to ask — is exactly whose star “Anora” will make.

One obvious (and obviously correct) answer is Mikey Madison, who plays the titular character. Madison is no newcomer; she played Sadie, a Manson family member, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”; and Pamela Adlon’s oldest daughter, Max, on the terrific FX show “Better Things.”

Madison has always been good, an ingénue with extraordinarily expressive features who can play bratty and naïve at the same time. But this role requires her to go for broke, with elements of slapstick, romance, comedy and tragedy, along with dancing in skimpy or nonexistent clothing and throwing a couple of powerful punches. Playing Anora called for both an emotionally rich inner life and a breathtakingly kinetic physicality, all poured into a character about whom people form opinions the moment they meet her. And at every moment, Madison is mesmerizing.

The movie is also a star maker for Baker, whose earlier films, like “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket,” have earned accolades and devoted audiences. With “Anora,” though, he has leveled up. (The film won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May.)

Baker is known for making movies about people on society’s margins, frequently sex workers. But this film, which Baker directed, wrote and edited, is steadier and more confident than his previous work. In some ways “Anora” has the most in common with Baker’s 2015 film, “Tangerine,” a screwball comedy about transgender sex workers in Los Angeles, shot on iPhones. But it also feels like a significant evolution in his style, and makes me excited to see what he does next.