By Bob Grimm

Pamela Anderson gives a great performance—one that’s sometimes unhinged and out there—in The Last Showgirl. It’s the first time I can think of that she’s disappeared into role. She really goes for broke—and scores.

As Shelly—a Vegas showgirl who learns the show she’s been featured in for decades is closing—Anderson does something special: a terrific character study. Shelly is at once caring and dangerously selfish. She is the mother hen to the younger dancers in her show, but neglects her adult daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), who took a back seat to her mother’s career.

There are moments in this movie when Anderson will tear your heart out, as she breaks down after a bad audition or loses it on a date. There are others when she’s very funny, and her line delivery is wonderfully bizarre and off-kilter. There’s nothing routine about what she does in the role. Director Gia Coppola captures something wonderful in these moments with Anderson.

Coppola’s cousin, Jason Schwartzman, shows up in a great cameo as a director watching Shelly do her first audition in years. The scene, although a bit predictable, gives Schwartzman the chance to be a special kind of nasty, and allows Anderson to portray many things, including some decent dancing skills to Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night.” As the scene unravels and things get out of control, their exchange is one of the film’s best.

As for the script … well, it feels a bit routine at times. This movie would not have been as watchable with somebody else in the lead role. Getting Anderson to play Shelly at this stage of Anderson’s career is lightning in a bottle. You’ll forgive some of the routine machinations in the script.

Further improving the film’s pedigree is Jamie Lee Curtis as Annette, a cocktail waitress and former dancing girl with a Trumpy spray tan and brown/orange hair. Curtis captures that dirty, sad and yet somehow optimistic side of Vegas where lives are shattered by broken dreams and gambling, but you just keep on chugging margaritas and cocktailing anyway. Her solo dance number to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is another of the film’s sad dancing highlights.

Dave Bautista capitalizes on the somber character he played in M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin with the sullen Eddie, who runs Shelly’s stage show and shares a strange past with her. Also impressive is Kiernan Shipka as Jodie, Shelly’s younger dancing partner; she has one of the film’s funnier moments re-enacting a raunchy routine she had to do for a show of which Shelly does not approve.

I’m citing a lot of performances, because they are the real reason to see this movie. The Last Showgirl is officially a 2024 release—Anderson just attended the Golden Globes and was deservedly nominated for Best Actress in a Dramatic Film—and the film boasts one of the year’s better ensemble casts, right up there with The Brutalist, Nosferatu and Conclave.

The film is ultimately heartbreaking; in the final scene, a luminescent Shelly dances in her show’s final night (the only time we see the show in the movie), smiling ear to ear—with just a twinkle of panic behind her eyes. Shelly’s aware she is in an industry that is not kind to women when it comes to age, as demonstrated in the aforementioned Schwartzman audition scene.

I’d like to think that Anderson’s best acting years are ahead of her after seeing what she can do in this movie. She has a starring role in the upcoming Naked Gun reboot alongside Liam Neeson, and she’s going to appear in the thriller Rosebush Pruning. I didn’t really care about the past or upcoming acting projects of Pamela Anderson until I saw this movie—but going forward, thanks to her performance in The Last Showgirl, I care a lot.

The Last Showgirl opens with showings on Thursday, Jan. 9.