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Support The Girls

The startlingly insightful comedy set in a Hooters-style bar is in theaters now.

Alissa Wilkinson covers film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.

Metacritic score: 85

Support the Girls, from writer and director Andrew Bujalski, is a barely concealed double entendre of a title for a film set in an even less coy Hooters-style bar called Double Whammies. Every day, the waitresses — pretty girls in crop tops and cutoffs — serve beer and wings to the mostly male clientele, though Double Whammies insists it’s a family-friendly “mainstream” place.

But Support the Girls is not at all the winkingly misogynist raunch-com for dudes that set-up might imply. Starting out as a workplace comedy featuring a sparkling female ensemble, the movie — set mostly over a single day — morphs into an affecting, startlingly insightful depiction of the bone-weary work of being a woman in a man’s world.

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