Toward the close of Quinn Shephard’s “Not Okay,” the film introduces a cheeky and somewhat clever visual: an “online shaming support group.” After Zoey Deutsch’s Danni Sanders faces a societal reckoning for building her public profile on an easily provable falsehood, she seeks solace with a group of real-life influencers who have faced various degrees of backlash, controversy, and cancellation. Among the assembled are fashionista best-dressed (who caught flak from her fans for taking a partnership with Amazon that many felt flew in the face of her pledged goal of sustainability), TikToker Josh Helfgott (whose privilege came into question over participating in a Zoom call for Black History Month), and popular streamer Rocco Botte of Mega64 (who became embroiled in scandal after an ex-girlfriend accused him of grooming).
But at the head of the discussion is none other than the Elizabeth Holmes of the influencer economy, Caroline Calloway. After getting busted by journalist Kayleigh Donaldson for running unorganized sham workshops, Calloway embraced her infamy and leaned into her villain era. She’s weathered getting canceled by folding it into her brand. All signs point to her shameless grift continuing, given that she’s embroiled in a lawsuit with her New York City landlord for $40,000 in unpaid rent this year. If there’s been a change of heart for Calloway, it’s certainly not reflected in her actions.
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Why all this hand-wringing over someone whose appearance makes up but a fraction of the runtime of “Not Okay?” For starters, the film introduces Danni early on by showing that she considers Calloway an aspirational figure … instant red flag. But Calloway’s reappearance in the coda comes as the film begins to hammer home its closing argument. Her presence muddles the message at best and exposes the film’s hollowness at worst.
Calloway’s queasy cameo recalls the real Jordan Belfort’s appearance at the close of “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It’s a thin line between depiction and glorification, and even a master like Martin Scorsese barely lands on the right side of it. The winking Belfort appearance needles the audience, forcing a confrontation with the fact that society barely punished this criminal — so why should the movie? There’s no such self-awareness in “Not Okay,” which appears disingenuously interested in rehabbing a figure who is unwilling to do the kind of soul-searching it demands for its own protagonist’s healing.
Shephard seizes on a popular strand of thought running through elite circles at the moment: so-called “cancel culture” has gone too far. The nomenclature has always missed the mark on what a social media-fueled movement hopes to accomplish. With a wider variety of voices able to make themselves heard, people are able to demand accountability from those who hide behind privilege and status to avoid it. Shephard, a millennial herself, disappointingly adopts the finger-wagging position of the Baby Boomers who stand to lose the most from this phenomenon. If Shephard’s opinion places her outside her generation’s mainstream, that’s fine and good. But she frustratingly cloaks her position as contrarian truth-telling, arguing for better treatment of the infamous when she’s really just laundering the position of the old guard: absolution without atonement.
From the film’s opening title card, which warns of an “unlikeable female protagonist,” Shephard dares the audience to hate Danni. This twentysomething photo editor at a nondescript online rag so desires to have her thoughts and existence validated that she’s willing to lean into tone-deafness as her brand. Deutsch quickly establishes the animating loneliness at Danni’s core that drives her to such narcissistic ends. “Not Okay” forces her to telegraph these moments through mind-numbingly obvious lines and plot beats, but she’s still effective at delivering the pit of existential anguish.
Desperation tips over into depravity for Danni after a humbling by her boss and errant dismissal by her colleague, Dylan O’Brien’s stoner influencer Colin. (This bleached scumbag pitched somewhere between Chet Hanks and Post Malone is purely a punchline, but O’Brien so fervently commits to the bit that the thin sketch of the character never feels like the caricature it is.) In a night of cannabis-induced stupor, Danni concocts a scheme utilizing her digital image manipulation skills to convince her Instagram followers that she’s at a writing workshop in Paris.
Shephard’s chosen inciting event stretches plausibility: who in this day and age would still fall for a Photoshop scam? What happens next gets a little more interesting, though, as a terrorist attack befalls the Arc de Triomphe just moments after Danni posts a doctored image from the site. In a split-second decision, she makes the decision to commit to the bit and pivot to full-time tragedy influencer. “Not Okay” may ask Deutsch to play her character as more oblivious than necessary, but it’s clear that her brain instinctually recognizes the power of collective trauma to cut through the noise on social media. Shephard locates the sad truth that these disasters rank among the few events that can bind younger generations in a fractured culture.
As the seductive power of her lie deepens, Danni gravitates toward parasitically leeching off those who have built actual platforms out of surviving calamity. She strikes up a friendship – or perhaps better described as networking into a professional partnership – with Mia Isaac’s Rowan Allen, a gun violence prevention activist who survived a Parkland-like school shooting. Though Rowan has built a massive platform by converting her anger and trauma into activism, she’s found a sustainable equilibrium not through individual will but through the collective solidarity of her fellow survivors. As Danni chases validation from strangers to up her post-like-count, the reality dawns on her that true happiness comes from community, not clout.
“Not Okay” circles these genuinely interesting ideas about what overly manicured social media profiles do to the psyche at a time when BeReal, a new app demanding unvarnished authenticity, is taking off. Yet Shephard is too eager to reach for the lowest-hanging fruit in the film, and it’s overripe by the time she grabs it. Social media and influencer culture, which exist in a state of perpetual motion, make for notoriously difficult moving targets to hit. Like the protagonist, the film chases the flashy and timely elements at the expense of elements that ring true against a grander time horizon.
That surface-level focus may be to the film’s ultimate benefit as the underlying ideas of this social media parable are frustratingly undercooked. For example, “Not Okay” nods toward the racialized difference of experience between Danni and Rowan, the latter of whom cannot rely on the protections of whiteness to insulate her from consequence. Yet it avoids interrogating these dynamics in any kind of depth so it can make another jab at the vacuity of influencers or the censoriousness of a society too quick to condemn strangers. In fear of alienating the audience by committing to the totality of unlikability, the film settles into an uneasy groove where it cannot satisfy by being unsatisfying.
Shephard’s film is a half-baked thinkpiece on cancel culture in search of a plausible narrative. While hitching her ideas to a scammer story, it loses the thread in a sea of topicality. No matter the potency contained in portions of her message, “Not Okay” is muddled by her delivery through the wrong medium. [C-]