When fledgling screenwriter Diablo Cody was nominated for an Academy Award in 2008, feature writers across the U.S. clicked their heels to learn that she’d once worked as a pole dancer. Her 2005 memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper provided an easy angle on Cody and, combined with her irreverent sense of humor, helped turn her into a media darling. Inevitably she’s become an object of fun, parodied as an empty vessel on Saturday Night Live and skewered in Bobcat Goldthwait’s movie God Bless America as “the only stripper with too much self-esteem.” Very few screenwriters become even minor celebrities, and one might argue that Cody’s experience has colored her writing; two of her lesser screenplays, for Young Adult (2011) and Ricki and the Flash (2015), deal with women boxed in by their wild reputations.
Tully explains that her job is to care for the mother as well as the child, and as the story progresses, she becomes Marlo’s friend, comforter, and life coach. She cleans the house while the family is asleep, and after Marlo makes a chance remark that good mothers send their children to school with cupcakes, Tully leaves a batch for her to find in the morning. The two women begin drinking and chatting together in the wee hours, and Tully treats Marlo to a makeup party. “You can’t be a good mother unless you practice self-care,” reasons Tully. Eventually the nanny persuades Marlo to leave her infant with her steady-Eddie husband, Drew (Ron Livingston), and embark on a wild night out to her old neighborhood in Brooklyn, where the two women get hammered at a club and rock out to a deafening band.
Directed by Jason Reitman. R, 96 min.
