The Last Showgirl: a cautious comeback vehicle for Pamela Anderson

As much as it loves tearing them down, Hollywood loves to build its icons back up. Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is a small, breathy indie that’s precision-tooled to kickstart the career resurrection of 1990s über-babe Pamela Anderson. But despite its appealing cast and mood of woozy melancholy, it is a curiously cautious example of the comeback machine at work, barely getting under the sequins, let alone the skin, of a bittersweet price-of-glamour story which reiterates the rueful truism that everything sparkly fades with time.

Against the coldly twinkling lights of Vegas, Anderson plays Shelly, a veteran performer in Le Razzle Dazzle, Sin City’s last remaining topless revue. Years ago Shelly was its star, but she has borne with good grace subsequent demotions. Indeed, her devotion to the show makes her its backstage linchpin, morale-boosting her younger castmates (including Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song) and insisting they’re part of a noble Parisian cabaret tradition. That the closest she’ll get to Paris is the model Eiffel Tower on the Strip doesn’t bother Shelly, who struggles every day but gets to live out her dreams every night she dons feathers and false eyelashes and steps on to the stage.

Her optimism – despite a broken relationship with her twentysomething daughter (Billie Lourd) – is in sharp contrast to the flinty cynicism of her cocktail-waitress bestie Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis in grotesquely unflattering make-up). It’s also unlike the quiet world-weariness of theatre manager Eddie (a lovable Dave Bautista), whose romantic history with Shelly seems forever on the verge of being rekindled. But Shelly’s self-deluding sweetness means she has further to fall when the show’s imminent closure is announced.

The echoes of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008) are striking. But Aronofsky’s portrait of battered bodies and scarred psyches is grandly tragic, especially in its meta-commentary on star Mickey Rourke’s physicality. Whatever depth The Last Showgirl has also comes from the blurred lines between character and actor but – ironically, given that Shelly’s business is nudity – neither is ever truly exposed. And so we get a comeback vehicle begging to be dubbed ‘revelatory’ which actually reveals little we didn’t know, or suspect, about the self-preservation instincts of Pamela Anderson. Good for her, you think, refusing to tear her heart open for our ghoulishly voracious viewing pleasure. Good for her, but bad for The Last Showgirl, which is gone from the memory, to a smattering of applause from a half-empty house, almost before it takes its final bow.

► The Last Showgirl is in UK cinemas now.