The Last Showgirl movie review (2025) | Little White Lies

The Last Show­girl review – dreamy and low-key to a fault

27 Feb 2025 / Released: 28 Feb 2025

Close-up of a person wearing a dark outfit with sequinned embellishments against a blurred night-time cityscape background.
Close-up of a person wearing a dark outfit with sequinned embellishments against a blurred night-time cityscape background.
4

Anticipation.

Pamela Anderson: a rich text.

3

Enjoyment.

A low-key, pleasant and predictable indie that feels more like Park City, Utah than Las Vegas, Nevada.

3

In Retrospect.

What happens in Vegas… is a metaphor for America.

Pamela Ander­son excels as an over-the-hill Vegas show­girl see­ing out her notice peri­od in this low-key, vibey back­stage dra­ma from Gia Coppola.

Her voice is not the attribute for which Pamela Ander­son has ever been most known, but it’s the best thing about The Last Show­girl: high and home­ly, cutesy, singsongy and often dra­mat­ic, with a Mar­i­lyn breath­i­ness in moments of inti­ma­cy and a forced for­mal­i­ty when ner­vous, and occa­sion­al­ly pushed to a point of squeaky des­per­a­tion, it’s a voice of incon­gru­ous inno­cence — incon­gru­ous for a 57-year-old sin­gle mom, and incon­gru­ous for a dancer in a Vegas nudie show who steps on stage every night in a feath­ered head­dress and see-through bra.

Like the nat­u­ral­is­tic flip­side to this year’s The Sub­stance, The Last Show­girl fol­lows a woman in late mid­dle age who is cast out of her glam­our pro­fes­sion for the crime of aging; even more acute­ly than The Substance’s Demi Moore, Ander­son, the wet-dream fan­ta­sy of the pneu­mat­ic 90s, is a walk­ing ledger of sex­u­al cur­ren­cy. She plays Shel­ley, the longest-tenured cast mem­ber of the notion­al­ly Parisian-inspired Le Raz­zle Daz­zle, the kind of show where rhine­stones and crys­tal beads are sup­posed to sig­ni­fy class, like the God­dess” revue in Verhoeven’s Showgirls.

Of course, that was a long time ago. (The Last Show­girl is set in the present day, but Shel­ley still makes calls from a land­line and gets paid in paper checks; nei­ther she nor her younger cast­mates self-pro­mote on social media, and the script peri­od­i­cal­ly con­flates 30 years ago” and the 1980s.”) These days, Shel­ley keeps rip­ping the fab­ric of her costume’s wings on a stage door’s han­dle as she hus­tles back­stage for a quick change; this bird doesn’t soar quite so high as she used to.

As the film begins, the stage man­ag­er (Dave Bautista, a qui­et guy in loud shirts) gives the dancers their two weeks’ notice; Raz­zle Daz­zle will be replaced by an adult cir­cus (rather than the celebri­ty con­cert res­i­den­cies that increas­ing­ly dom­i­nate a mod­ern Vegas approach­ing four-quad­rant appeal). What fol­lows is a lot of stock-tak­ing, and the indig­ni­ty of cat­tle-call audi­tions. She’d retire, but she loves to dance, and any­way, none of the girls in the Raz­zle Daz­zle have a 501k” [sic], in the words of Shelley’s best friend (Jamie Lee Cur­tis), a cock­tail wait­ress in dyed red hair and con­trol-top hose, who still has pok­er chips stuffed down her cleav­age as a tip.

In his new book On the Edge, the sta­tis­ti­cian and pun­dit Nate Sil­ver takes the mea­sure of a Unit­ed States where gam­bling and gam­i­fi­ca­tion is becom­ing some­thing like a nation­al pas­time: not just seen in the expand­ed legal­i­ty of sports bet­ting, but in day trad­ing, cryp­to, home flip­ping. Las Vegas is some­thing like the spec­u­la­tion cap­i­tal of the world, and it’s also a town whose main indus­try is the hos­pi­tal­i­ty indus­try, which is to say it runs on the labor of a pre­car­i­ous class of ser­vice employ­ees, work­ing phys­i­cal­ly demand­ing, low-pay­ing jobs with no safe­ty net and lit­tle process of advance­ment. Sprung up in the mid­dle of the desert, Vegas is some­thing like a cap­i­tal­ist mirage.

I’ve been on the Raz­zle Daz­zle for so long,” Shel­ley says at an audi­tion for a new show, a wist­ful won­der­ment in Anderson’s voice. She is both a sell­er of the fan­ta­sy of Vegas, and one of its best cus­tomers, a com­modi­tised body who’s giv­en her life to an ersatz dream of show­biz. She prac­tices her audi­tion num­ber in a bal­let dancer’s leo­tard, though that’s not what she’ll be wear­ing onstage. The film’s title card appears against a back­drop of cos­tume jew­ellery, like in Sirk’s Imi­ta­tion of Life.

Like Imi­ta­tion of Life, The Last Show­girl treats high-gloss fem­i­nin­i­ty as a form of false con­scious­ness, an ide­al imposed upon women that ends up alien­at­ing them from each oth­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly moth­ers from their daugh­ters. Shel­ley is semi-estranged from her daugh­ter (Bil­lie Lourd), who spent much of her child­hood play­ing Game Boy in a parked car while her moth­er danced. Anoth­er, more obvi­ous com­par­i­son here is The Wrestler, a masc ver­sion of the dete­ri­o­rat­ing-show­biz-body-dra­ma-with-meta­tex­tu­al-star-cast­ing tem­plate. (The screen­play of The Last Show­girl is by TV scribe Kate Ger­sten, whose hus­band, Matthew Shire, is the son of Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s sis­ter Talia Shire. The film’s open­ing cred­its are in a dusky pink straight out of the palette of Gia Coppola’s aunt Sofia, a film­mak­er who also knows from raz­zle dazzle.)

If the moth­er-daugh­ter stuff is deriv­a­tive, it’s not manip­u­la­tive; shot in grainy, sun-sat­u­rat­ed hand­held, with lens flare blow­ing out the sandy desert hues, it’s dreamy and low-key to a fault, even when the old show­girls dance to Bon­nie Tyler and Pat Benatar. The twice-dai­ly per­for­mances of Le Raz­zle Daz­zle anchor the film, but Cop­po­la keeps her cam­era almost entire­ly back­stage. Teas­ing out her long blonde hair and pound­ing her face into shape with pow­der puffs and brush­es, she trans­forms from a sweet, squin­ty work­ing woman into a vision of desir­abil­i­ty who still looks like Pamela Ander­son — beau­ty as just anoth­er day at the office.

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