‘Support the Girls’ on Hulu: 2018’s Best Movie About “Economic Anxiety”

A day in the life of a manager of a fictional Hooters-esque sports bar doesn’t seem on the surface to be the ideal engine for a thoughtful reflection on the economic crunch that so many people feel here in 2019. But writer/director Andrew Bujalski and his star, Regina Hall, defy all of those expectations in Support the Girls, an under-the-radar indie stunner from 2018 that is kicking off 2019 exactly right by streaming on Hulu for all to enjoy.

Support the Girls follows Lisa (Hall) through a trying (if not atypical, we’re led to believe) day as the manager at Double Whammies, a fictional bar and grill that caters to men who like to “flirt” with the scantily-clad waitstaff. She has to deal with the cable going out on the day of a big-draw boxing fight, an employee whose giant torso tattoo of Steph Curry’s face means she’s probably getting fired, a car wash to raise money for another employee whose piece of shit boyfriend put her in the hospital, a customer verbally abusing one of the girls, and an inept burglar who got caught in the ceiling and whose kitchen-staff cousin also needs to be fired. All of this snakes around Lisa’s crumbling marriage, training a batch of new girls on the line between (acceptably) flirty and (frowned-upon) slutty, making the schedules, and having to keep asshole boss Cubby (James Le Gros) at bay.

For as much as the term “economic anxiety” has earned its scare quotes as a double-speak term for racist voters supporting racist policies under the umbrella of poor economic conditions, Support the Girls stands in for the idea of actual economic anxiety better than any movie this year. There is a palpable sense of a fucked economic situation throughout the film. The girls who work at Whammies put up with all sorts of skeezy behavior in order to keep their low-paying jobs, and to help them cope, they come up with rules and strategies to get by and scams to get more. Lisa, meanwhile, sits in the middle, co-opting corporate mandate language in order to make her girls feel safe and secure while at the same time holding a hard line about, yes, giant Steph Curry face tattoos. Hall toes that line beautifully, shouldering every bit of that middle-manager’s burden and finding grace notes to spare in every kind interaction or frustrated silent scream. “I started this day off crying,” she tells her one confidant in the middle of a fit of frustrated laughter, “so if you ask me, laughing is progress.”

The screws of capitalism tighten around the Whammies staff in ways seen and unseen, but Bujalski’s script keeps giving them moments of generosity and connection to offset the stench of fried meat and a paycheck spent pretending men sound interesting when they talk about boxing. Such is how a movie about a knock-off Hooters franchise ended up saying more about the state of the American worker than any politician came close to.

Stream Support the Girls on Hulu