The body politic, indeed.
Soderbergh stages a film that suggests what might have happened if Jean-Luc Godard had been inexplicably tapped to direct one of Tom Cruise’s schlocky 1980s testaments to self-realization, particularly Cocktail [1988].
— Chuck Bowen (Slant Magazine)
What happens will be familiar if you’ve ever seen one of those variations on the fallen-woman movie. An elastic genre popular in the 1920s and ’30s, these flicks usually involve a working-class young miss who comically scrambles or crudely tramps her way into a mink, swank digs and finally either tragedy or redemption, depending on whether she’s doomed or saved. Sometimes she also initiates an innocent into her life pretty much the same way Mike brings Adam into his world of sexual play, casual drug use and dance music. In the past the movies were very much preoccupied with the moral regulation of women, but here the stress is on Mike’s struggle to succeed.
— Manohla Dargis (The New York Times)
When you sleep with a girl who has a pet piglet and wake up with the little fella eating your vomit, surely you’ve hit bottom.
Mike, an experienced stripper, takes a younger performer called The Kid under his wing and schools him in the arts of partying, picking up women, and making easy money.