'Zola' review: Compelling, surreal and honest movie based on a viral Twitter thread

"Zola" stands as a milestone in cinematic history.

It is what appears to be the first feature film to have been derived entirely from a viral Twitter thread, this one recounting a surreal story its author claimed to have really happened to her.

That makes it very much a motion picture of this particular moment. But thanks to the smart work of its makers and the excellent performances by its leads, "Zola" is not a novelty act.

Filmmaker Janicza Bravo ("Atlanta," "Them") and her co-writer Jeremy O. Harris adapt the 148-tweet long epic that Aziah "Zola" King unfurled in 2015 into an on-screen narrative that explores the world of sex workers and strip clubs depicted by the author, in a fashion that is both sensitive and empathetic.

Taylour Paige plays Zola, a server who meets Stefani (Riley Keough) while on the job and decides on a whim to join her on a trip to Florida to dance in clubs there. As anyone familiar with the tweets will know, Stefani omitted a lot of pertinent information in this invitation. That begins with the fact that her boyfriend Derek (Nicholas Braun) and pimp X (Colman Domingo, who is astonishingly great, both terrifying and pathetic) would join them for the journey.

The picture explores some dark terrain and the balancing act required to do this correctly poses an enormous filmmaking challenge.

On one hand, this is the sort of pulpy journey through an illicit universe that might have attracted a filmmaker like Quentin Tarantino.

Things get stranger and stranger over the course of the story and there are some details, such as the fact that Domingo's character's accent changes when he raises his voice, that would seem to have been a stroke of comic genius were they not lifted directly from the Twitter thread.

But even as Bravo takes the audience through some genuinely jaw-dropping events, she never loses sight of the fundamental humanity underlying it all. Instead of indulging in the male gaze or objectifying these characters, she works to make the movie subvert expectations and rebalance the power equation in their favor.

The picture presents Stefani and Zola as strong women pushing back against the abuses forced upon them, as best they can — in one of the movie's most powerful scenes, Zola helps Stefani make a calculated business decision that increases her earnings several times over.

Paige and Keough recognize this inner strength and play to it, to great effect: their characters might never wish speak to each other again after this terrible weekend is over and might even disagree on the facts of what happened. But in the moment, they know they're all they have. They're victimized but not victims, empowered and given the agency to tell their stories, their way.