Trick and tweet. And twerk the live long night.

That’s the drill in ZOLA, a tweaky little treat about strippers and toxic tease.

ZOLA begins—fittingly—in a Detroit Hooters, where 19-year-old Zola is working as a waitress when a chance encounter with a customer known as Stefani changes her life.

Stefani is a less than stable single mum with a besotted bumbling boyfriend and a pernicious pimp. She convinces Zola that there is money to be made in Tampa pole dancing. The pimp purports there’s more money in horizontal rhumba.

Taylour Page plays the savvy Zola with an underplay and understatement that is transfixing. With minimal dialogue but a body language that can only be interpreted as intelligent and full of agency its a text book empowering performance for the texting, sexting, tweeting age.

Matching and contrasting is Riley Keough as Stefani, a dialled up performance of a real wild child, unpredictable, both vulnerable victim and voracious vulture.

ZOLA includes two very different male supporting characters—one who is trying to peddle Stefani and Zola for sex work, and another who is

trying, haphazardly, to rescue Stefani from her increasingly dangerous side-hustle.

Playing Stefani’s Nigerian pimp, actor Colman Domingo brings a loose-cannon tension to the movie, mirroring Stefani’s volatility. As her baffled beau, Derrick, Nicholas Braun brings a nutty naivety, a besotted foolishness, and some unadorned slapstick.

The tenor and texture of Tampa strip malls, strip joints, seedy motel rooms in brilliantly exploited by cinematographer Ari Wegner and production designer Katie Byron.

Mica Levi’s score is atmospherically perfect and the sound mix punctuated by tweet audio is superb

Director Janicza Bravo and Co writer Jeremy O. Harris zero in on ZOLA as a circus of desire in the digital age, giving us a ring side seat. Candid, confronting and very, very funny.

Richard Cotter