Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Stormy’ on Peacock, a Flawed But Fascinating Documentary About Stormy Daniels’ Quest to Tell the Truth

Stormy Daniels surely didn’t realize how prescient she was being when adopting that porn-actress stage name. The new documentary Stormy (a Peacock original) gets into the nitty-gritty of her life between 2018 and now, in the wake of the revelation that she was paid $130,000 in “hush money” after having sex with a very married-to-someone-else Donald Trump back in 2006. Notably, Judd Apatow, who hired Daniels for cameo appearances in Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, is an executive producer of the doc, which director Sarah Gibson pieces together from current-day interviews, archival clips and previously unused footage culled from a documentary that never came to fruition – by journalist Denver Hicks, who not only followed Daniels with a camera at the peak of the scandal, but also, in the film’s own words, had a “brief affair” with her. Gibson kind of fudges and glosses over that fact, thus compromising some of Stormy’s integrity as a piece of serious journalism, but the doc gets its point across nonetheless. 

STORMY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Asked to introduce herself, Daniels says she’s an “adult film star, writer, mom and a pain in the ass.” She was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; she’s loved horses since she was a kid; she’s had a long and successful career as a stripper, porn actress and porn director. Her level of fame within her profession led to a 2006 meeting with Trump in his hotel room, where they discussed the possibility of her being on Celebrity Apprentice – and then had sex, which Daniels says was consensual, but wasn’t previously implied or expected, which firmly places it in the vast gray area between assault and a mutually enjoyable experience. Her summation? “It was awful.” You probably know what happened next: In 2016, just prior to Trump being elected President, he and his lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels off and made her sign a nondisclosure agreement. Two years later, the Wall Street Journal made the story public, and the result was utter pandemonium.

But, unlike most Trump-related scandals, the Stormy affair didn’t fade into the din of tumult engulfing – and created by – his divisive and volcanically maddening presidency, where one insane thing eclipsed the previous insane thing, which eclipsed a previous insane thing, ad nearly f—ing infinitum. Daniels kept her end of the NDA bargain until Cohen tried to capitalize on events with a book deal, prompting her to lawyer up and step into the spotlight, in an attempt to control her own story. This is about when Hicks started filming her life, capturing her on her couch watching her own 60 Minutes interview, following her to the green rooms of Jimmy Kimmel Live and SNL, hanging with her on tour buses and in hotels as she went on her Make America Horny Again strip-club tour as she capitalized on her fame and became an unsuspecting flashpoint for political liberals, who championed her as an icon for the #MeToo movement, feminism and truthtelling in general. And of course, the media consumed every second of it.

Hicks’ camera captures Daniels in vulnerable moments as her marriage sours, she argues with her husband and mother, and she wrestles with the guilt she feels being away from her young daughter; by that point, she was subject to such significant public scrutiny and threats, she lamented that her family was safer when she wasn’t around. Gibson interviews Daniels’ ex-husband Brendon Miller via internet video chat, and he talks vaguely about Daniels’ infidelity and the emotional complexity of the situation. Gibson notably doesn’t interview Hicks, who frequently appears in his own footage; Hicks’ “brief affair” with Daniels is addressed with a brief on-screen subtitle, leaving the timeline of events murky. Other talking heads range from Daniels’ childhood friend Travis Partin to Seth Rogen, (and you’ll notice these two big ones are NBC employees) Rachel Maddow and Kimmel, who pop up here and there to contextualize her public and courthouse battles with Trump and the currently incarcerated lawyer who stole some of her book-deal earnings from her, Michael Avenatti. We eventually catch up to the near-present day, when she finds her almost-calmed-down life once again dragged into media focus in the wake of Trump’s numerous legal indictments. Will Stormy Daniels ever be at peace?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Aside from Monica Lewinsky’s documentary 15 minutes of Shame, two Famous Blonde docs come to mind, and stylistically and thematically, Stormy exists right smack in the median between them: Pamela Anderson vanity/self-reclamation doc Pamela: A Love Story and sloppy tabloid doc Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s not really a “performance,” but Daniels comes off as an I-am-what-I-am person who’s unapologetically herself, like she couldn’t be phony if she tried. In a time when awful people double down on their bad behavior, she routinely doubles down on her core ideal that truth is more important than anything else in this life. That requires more bravery than taking your clothes off in front of people – and you can’t help but admire it.  

Memorable Dialogue: In a sad moment, Daniels sums up the absurd comic tragedy her life has become: “Instead of being there for (my daughter), I’m here talking about an ex-President’s penis.”

Sex and Skin: Shots of a topless Daniels dancing in clubs and posing for magazines.

Our Take: Let’s put this right up front here: Stormy’s unwillingness to diligently address her affair with Hicks (again, nobody talks about it on camera) at least somewhat compromises the doc’s journalistic integrity. Fleeting acknowledgment shouldn’t dismiss our scrutiny. It’s almost as if Gibson is afraid of tainting Daniels’ status as a sympathetic figure – although of course she can be that and a flawed human being. Both can be simultaneously true. But it’s troublesome for a documentary about a woman’s admirably dogged and principled attempts to expose the capital-T Truth.

Two on-the-surface contradictory things are also true about Stormy: It’s deeply flawed, but it also does some justice to Daniels where the rest of the world – including the justice system itself – failed her. There’s no moralistic pearl-clutching about Daniels’ porn career; it’s presented as fact, and it’s her life and her choice, and she’s good at it, and the implication is, let’s cease with the puritanism about this shit. Exploitation and opportunism is how the business works, so it makes sense that Daniels would run with it and capitalize on the Trump scandal, and she owns that. 

What becomes fascinating about the documentary, and therefore Daniels’ character, is, she subsequently wrestles with whether it was worth the trouble. She compromised her relationships with her husband and daughter. She exacerbated abuse on social media by fighting back against Trump and Twitter trolls (stuff she can weather because, as Miller describes it, her porn career helped her develop the “calluses” to endure it). She’s suffered veiled in-person death threats. She’s accrued six figures’ worth of legal debt and was ripped off by unscrupulous parties. Monetarily, none of it was “worth the trouble,” but she convincingly insists that she wishes she’d spoken up about the Trump incident sooner for the sake of women he may have subsequently abused, that she hangs in there and doesn’t go away because nothing is more important than truth and the pursuit of it – even when she worries that telling the truth “doesn’t matter anymore.” We believe it when talking-head commentators assert that she paid a price for sticking to it, for trying to take a very powerful man to task. You know how it goes: Nevertheless, she persisted. And you can’t help but admire that persistence. 

Our Call: The most valuable ideas Stormy presents seep through its frequently problematic presentation. Keep that contradiction in mind while you STREAM IT and you’ll come out the other end more informed about a hurricane of a scandal than you were before.  

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.