On demand: "Not Okay"

Not Okay finds the movies taking another pop at influencer culture, in part because they're worried TikTok might be eroding their market share. (Plugged in though the film is, you could see it as a continuation of a movie tradition, updating the firmware of all those Fifties films that identified the upstart medium of television as the enemy.) Zoey Deutch, a useful actress who's spent her early career being routinely underused, is Danni, a penniless attention hog who fakes a Paris trip to cop an Insta follow from jive-talking weed blogger Colin (Dylan O'Brien, with Pete Davidson hair and tattoos), the kind of character who would only begin to make sense as an online construction. This little red-white-and-blue lie - achieved with the help of Photoshop - snowballs out of control after terrorists strike the actual French capital, leading our gal to cosplay the role of trauma victim, claiming she was closer to the bomb blasts than she actually was and more affected than anybody else. It's a film with targets in mind, then: not just the pushy, me-first narcissism of the influence sphere, but those who would platform and amplify it (here, a website called Depravity), the delicacies and absurdities of office culture, and performative allyship, from Kendall Jenner (a running joke here) to men with damaged-girl fetishes. For writer-director Quinn Shephard, fakery is the central plank in all this: it's why Danni thinks nothing of attending a victim-support group to take notes on what real hurt looks and sounds like. Yet equally this filmmaker isn't so dismissive as to discount the possibility a lot of this damage is being done by misguided children, fumbling their way into the adult world of greater responsibility.

Even so, Not Okay doesn't shy away from brushing up against the odd raw nerve. You do wonder (and worry) what survivors of the Bataclan attack and Manchester Arena bombing will make of Shephard raising this subject, whether implicitly or otherwise. And it's a genuine twist of the knife to have Danni, while operating under these false pretences, befriend a Black survivor of a high-school shooting in which her younger sister was killed: this is Rowan (Mia Isaac), who's channelled some of her grief into Amanda Gorman-like spoken-word performance and herself become an online figurehead. (Her most impassioned viral clip cues a not untypically tonedeaf response from Danni: "Skin goals!") Yet you can nevertheless see and feel the film maturing as it goes along. Early scenes suggest a snarky comedy pursuing a decidedly off-kilter rhythm: that of people who are online all day, and too busy scrolling to much listen to or care what folks in the real world are saying. As Danni and Rowan bond, however, Not Okay begins to develop into a more nuanced morality play: the former gets everything she's wished for - celebrity, community, meaningful connection - only to know full well it's been founded on a terrible lie. Between them, Shephard, Deutch and Isaac allow that sorry truth to sink in, and behind those initial sneers, we glimpse a quality present in the best satires: a sadness, maybe even a flicker or two of anger, that this is the way it now is, that the sometime ideals of online communication - of deep human connection and speaking truth to power - have been obscured by hollow, phony images and vapid, gaseous wordclouds, belched out like so much vape smoke. 

Not Okay is currently streaming via Disney+.