Movie Nation

Lurid and louche, instantly awful and the quintessence of filmed “camp,” “Showgirls” rode to screen infamy when it rolled into theaters in 1995, greeted with almost universal derision and disdain.

It blurred the line between overwrought acting and incompetent acting. It is a movie about misogyny by the cinema’s greatest misogynists. Its earliest label might have been the most apt — a “cocaine” musical, a cynical, delusional piece of NC-17 titillation wrapped in some idea of “feminism” shared by the pervy sexists who made it and the Hollywood that released it.

But then the gay community embraced it, drag queens started vamping out sequences as part of their act. Alternative publications looked at it through auteurist, feminist or queer eyes as midnight movie audiences and home video fans watched it over and over and over again.

If you didn’t see “You Don’t Nomi” coming, you should have. If Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” triggered obsessives around the world, leading to the fascinating “deep dive” documentary, “Room 237,” hell, if “Bronies” (“My Little Pony” cultists) can inspire musicals and a documentary about their devotion, then why not a wholesale reevaluation of “Showgirls” as not just a “s— film,” not just a “cult film,” not so much a “lost masterpiece” as a “masterpiece of s—?”

“You Don’t Nomi” takes its title from “Showgirls”‘ leading lady a small town dancer (Elizabeth Berkley) who leaves dreary, hypocritical Rural America for the bright lights, skin and lap-dancing of Vegas.

Filmmaker Jeffrey McHale doesn’t just find a new generation of critics to ridicule those of us who panned the picture when it came out. He interviews (all off-camera, heard in voice-over) people who have written books of poetry about it, staged drag shows based on “Showgirls,” who adapted “Saved by the Bell” (the tween-TV comedy Berkley was previously known for) and its aftermath (“Showgirls”) into a stage musical.

We hear — a LOT — from critics and others who have made this picture’s reevaluation a calling card. And McHale builds his documentary around their arguments, generously sampling from director Paul Verhoeven’s preceding career, and the greatly-diminished screen resume that followed “Showgirls.”

Yes, Verhoeven started laughing at himself very early in the backlash, accepting Razzies for the film’s disastrous reception. And yes, he’s embraced the various re-interpretations, the appreciations built on the long arc of his career, the motifs he returned to again and again, the “mirror” his mirror-filled glitterball in the abattoir “satire” was holding up to America and to world culture.

The film came out in post-Clarence Thomas/then-current Bill Clinton sex scandal America, “a pretty fraught moment.” The Dutch Verhoeven’s penchant for gymnastic, theatrical sex (“Basic Instinct”), graphic violence (“Robocop”), stylized acting and arch dialogue (“Starship Troopers”), for shots of women vomiting, rape scenes and excess all came home to roost here.

People laughed out loud at the ugliest moments when “Showgirls” came out. It was never intended as a comedy, but has been embraced since as “a type of comedy you can’t make on purpose.”

Seattle critic Adam Nayman has turned the film into a cottage industry, writing “It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls” books, doing the voice commentary for anniversary edition DVDs and Q & As with Verhoeven as he rides this wave. He’s the dominant voice in “Nomi.” A few older critics remember panning the picture or thinking more of it than most at the time of release, and a few younger women critics complain about and rationalize the picture’s misuse of African American characters and Verhoeven’s career-long way of abusing women on the set or on camera.

Verhoeven paid for his sins, and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas — all but forgotten in the doc after the first 20 minutes or so — never amounted to much after “Showgirls” either. At least the ageing director got to make “Elle” and “Black Book” in Europe and live long enough to see this reviled bomb find an audience and a place in the culture.

I’ve interviewed him several times over the years, and would heartily agree with the film’s assessment of his prescience about fascism’s return (“Robocop,” “Starship Troopers”), a sort of Decline of the Roman Empire decadence that exposes American sexual/gender hypocrisy (“Showgirls,” “Basic Instinct”). He was always the first to admit the film was supposed to be serious, even as he’s been quick — desperately quick — to embrace its camp reinterpretation.

And it’s gratifying to see Berkley get the tiniest smidgen of — respect isn’t the word — appreciation for what she did in the film’s two hours of near-hysterical “acting.” Verhoeven rightly tries to take the hit for that. It’s the performance he says he wanted, just as Volker Schlöndorff wanted Elisabeth Shue to give us a bad actor’s idea of what “playing a role” looked like in “Palmetto (1998).” Berkely’s career never recovered, and if there’s justice and a lawyer in the the house, a buck from every download and Bluray sale of “Showgirls” should go to her.

“You Don’t Nomi” makes some points, misses the mark attempting to make others, but keeps us entertained as it encourages film buffs to view “Showgirls” within the framework of a filmmaker’s career, to accept that notion that “An artist is someone pounds the same nail, over and over again.” It wasn’t an aberration, but perfectly representative of Verhoeven’s canon. And yes, he did put everything in there “for a reason.” The big argument one can have with these obsessives is that “Not a SMART reason” has to be considered as a possibility.

Otherwise, “Hudson Hawk” rises to the top of the pantheon.

I was reminded of a Verhoeven’s many stomach-turning moments before and after “Showgirls” via a flash of “Black Book” torture here, some “Total Recall” violence there, the queasiness of alien vivisection in “Starship Troopers.” Yes, “Showgirls” was the “unsexiest sex movie” of them all. Kind of gross, to be honest.

But sure, like a lot of critics, I held on to MGM’s companion glossy “book” after the movie released at the time. I mean, one doesn’t toss glossy books, does one? Nude pictures and what not?

If there’s a failing to the documentary, it’s in making light of the “changing tastes” argument for the film’s creation and reception.

But you don’t have to agree with the thesis, with every talking point burnishing the film’s status, to enjoy seeing these obsessives make their case.

“Showgirls” is camp-defined, “failed seriousness.” It is a “sex cartoon.”

And if there’s a pantheon of overwrought, female-centered films of disrespected, disregarded and troubled women, movies rediscovered by and heralded by the gay audience, “Showgirls” and Berkley deserve to be right up there with Patty Duke and “Valley of the Dolls” and Faye Dunaway and “Mommie Dearest.”

MPAA Rating: Unrated, cinematic violence, nudity, simulated sex, profanity

Cast: Paul Verhoeven, Elizabeth Berkley, Gena Gershon, Joe Eszterhas, the voices of Adam Nayman, Haley Mlotek, April Kidwell, many others

Credits: Written and directed by Jeffrey McHale. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:32

Kudrow and Malkovich, Lynch and Willard and Carell.

“Serious” doesn’t figure into this series, premiering May 29.

Alastair Sim came along entirely too soon to made his mark in any film version of “Lord of the Rings.”

And more’s the pity, because if ever was an actor who looked at home with a pipe and had the ostentatiously hairy ears for it, it was Sim, the devilishly funny character actor who was, for generations, the definitive Ebeneezer Scrooge.

He’s the focus of a new Film Movement BluRay boxed set collection of Brit comedies of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, the most famous of which is the last, “School for Scoundrels,” a glorious victory lap for the old “Ealing Comedy” style, even though Ealing Studios didn’t release this one.

If you’re only familiar with the brash, profane and in-your-face Jon Heder, Billy Bob Thornton remake (2006), here’s the quaint and ever-so-proper British farce that inspired it, a film of the Stephen Potter novels about a place where “losers” (men) learned to stop losing, to “one-up” rather than “one-down” in the game of life.

It’s deliciously dry and droll, subtly slapshticky and timelessly topical in all those male gender expectations way.

Ian Carmichael, straight man in many a classic British comedy, perhaps best known for being the definitive Lord Peter Wimsey in the detective series of the ’70s, is Henry Palfrey, a 40ish executive in charge of an accounting firm who shows up at Mr. S. Potter’s (Sim) School for “Lifemanship” is the town of Yeoril.

It’s where “underdogs” learn to become “top men,” where Mr. Potter and his instructors teach “the science of being one-up on your opponent at all times.”

Henry’s first meeting with Potter gives away his game — as in he hasn’t one. A quick exchange of greetings becomes a deft play on status, who is “Potter” and who is “Mr. Palfrey” or simply “Henry.” Henry’s so whipped he doesn’t even realize when he’s been whipped.

“My round, I think,” “MISTER” Potter twinkles at the oblivious Henry.

“Frankly Mr. Potter, I’m a failure!”

“Noooooooooooo.”

A flashback shows us Henry’s fortune stumble into “a girl,” his status at the office he’s allegedly running, being taken at a car dealership (“The Winsome Welshman,” run by Dennis Price and Peter Jones) and finally LOSING “the girl” (Janette Scott) after an upstaged date at a tony restaurant, and a head-games tennis match, both of which he manages to be “one-upped” in by the pushy cad Raymond Delauney.

“Hard cheese, old boy!”

As Delauney is played by that mustache-stroking rotter Terry-Thomas, you could see how that would happen. Raymond oozes “class,” or at least the snobby British version of it — reading the menu in French, ordering for “the table,” sticking Henry with the check, and then getting him on the tennis court where he can psyche out his inferior in front of “the girl” and further show him up with his new “Bellini” roadster (Astin Martin DB3S).

The car deal Henry, trying to compete, is hoodwinked into looks rather like “a Polish stomach pump,” Raymond cracks.

Henry is desperate enough to take “Lifemanship” classes from Mr. Potter, a course in “Gamesmanship,” another in “Clothesmanship,” “Carmanship” (how to deal with salesmen) and most importantly “WOO-manship,” the art of wooing and winning the fair lady.

The bulk of the movie is Henry’s effort to transition “from the theory to the practices.”

The Hollywood remake of this story brought a clever wrinkle to it by having our loser have to face off with his teacher (Billy Bob) in the quest for “the girl.”

Here, Sim is the wry teacher, observer and co-conspirator in Henry’s makeover and search for revenge. He’s delightfully droll, first scene to last.

Terry-Thomas was every American kid’s idea of a British villain in comedies of the ’50s into the ’70s. A leer, and gap-toothed shark’s grin and a “Drat” and “Bloody Hell!” (“LANGUAGE, sir!”) could reduce you to stitches.

The settings and set-ups in this Robert Hamer comedy — he is most famous for “Kind Hearts and Coronets” — show us an England of bowler hats and London buses, posh French eateries and Old School schools and clubs where the worn tennis nets and outdated manor house clubhouse scream “TRADITION,” and remind one and all that World War II did not to equalize the classes. Oh no, old boy. Not in the least.

“School for Scoundrels” doesn’t finish as well as it starts, and one can see where those remaking it felt at liberty to try and tighten it up, heighten the comic conflict. Director Hamer was an alcoholic and died just a couple of years after this came out, and needed co-directing help from others. just to finish “School.”

The movie achieves “classic” status by virtue of its influence as a style of class-clash comedy lives on in the wittier moments in the action franchise “Kingsman” and the like.

Eagle-eared viewers will recognize the voice of “The Book” from the famed “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” radio and TV series, Peter Jones. He’s one of the hustlers unloading “a 1924 Swiftmobile” on hapless Henry, who needs a car to impress the lady.

And Terry-Thomas and Sim remind us why they became brand names in British comedy, carving out niches that made each immortal — one an over-groomed exemplar of “Why we hate the upper classes,” the other content to grin through though ever-so-English teeth, never ever trim his ear hair, and give us lessons in how to throw the other bloke off his or her game, the only lecturer whose take on the Biblical creation of “Adam” is worth hearing out.

“Thus, the first loser was born.”

MPAA Rating: “Approved”

Cast: Ian Carmichael,  Janette Scott, Terry-Thomas, Peter Jones, Dennis Price and Alastair Sim

Credits: Directed by Robert Hamer. Script by Patricia Moyes and Hal E. Chester, based on the Stephen Potter novels. A Film Movement release

Running time: 1:34

Is nothing sacred?

Donnie Yen, who can do martial arts AND comedy with the best of them (He stole “Rogue One”) is the big name on the Marquee for this martial arts action farce.

Coming soon? We hope.

Here’s a poignant romance about two Canadian women who passed themselves off as “cousins” for almost three quarters of a century because they grew up and fell in love at a time when that was called “the love that dare not speak its name.”

“A Secret Love” is in an intimate, chaste romance starring two discrete little old ladies, longtime Chicagoans, who let one of them’s great nephew interview them about their lives and their love affair as those lives were starting to wind down.

Chris Bolan’s film tilts towards his great Aunt Terry Donahue, and captures some of the family friction that comes with end-of-life decisions, a situation only slightly complicated by the fact that they’re gay and kept that a secret from their families for over 60 years.

Family friction about “coming out?” There are dead relatives who wouldn’t have approved, we hear. But that’s not where the drama is here, because there was no drama about that, just one niece who grins as she huffs that they need to get married.

“Well, they can’t keep on living in sin.”

That’s the tone, here. It’s adorable, they’re adorable, and their story — starting in the mid-1940s and taken through to today — has a few surprises, a few bumps in the road, and a lot of warmth.

Terry is the more outgoing one, all but smothered by an adoring niece, Diane, who is heck-bent on getting them to relocate back in Canada — Edmonton, Alberta, not far from the small farm towns Terry and longtime companion Pat Henschel.

“Aunt” Pat is the reticent one, and in her we see the embodiment of Kurt Vonnegut’s description of a loving couple in trying times, “a nation of two.” They moved in together in another country because they knew no same sex couples, had no exposure to this “”underground” gay life that was only underground in places big enough for a subway — cities.

Small towns, where some girls were most comfortable playing baseball or hockey together and found their first stirrings of attraction among teammates? Homosexuality was pretty much invisible. These two met playing girls’ hockey, and felt the spark in an instant.

Pat loves being the sole support to Terry, who has Parkinson’s when we meet her, with Pat on the phone to her doctor, seeking counsel as her “cousin.” Over half a century of being the center of each other’s closeted lives, with a happy close circle of friends, fulfilling interior design careers behind them and a comfy life together — Pat’s not interested in leaving that and frozen Chicago behind for frigid and unfamiliar Edmonton.

“A Secret Love” doesn’t set out to be a history of changing attitudes towards homosexual relationships. But it pays lip service to the politically-motivated police persecution of the past, and samples that same 1967 Mike Wallace CBS documentary “The Homosexuals” that turn up in gay history documentaries to illustrate how far we’ve come.

The sense “A Secret Love” leaves you with is of lives that were more circumspect than circumscribed. They avoided gay bars back when those were being raided by Mayor Daley’s Chicago P.D. “We didn’t want to get sent to Canada, have their Green Cards yanked and themselves deported.

They missed nothing (each enjoys a beer or the occasional highball, even in their ’80s). Their home movies and hundreds of still photographs capture a deep intimacy easily masked by their conservative demeanor. Their dress and home decor is little-old-lady fussy, with lots of brick-a-brack — nothing that gives away their sexuality. The gay couple they’re closest to is male and decorates the same way. We see none of the explicit nudes that have become the gay decorating stereotype.

But as conservative as they are, Bolan sees them as ahead-of-the-curve feminists. And learning of Terry’s first career — as a shortstop for the Peoria nine who were in the All American Girls Baseball League, “A League of Their Own” in the 1940s — makes that case for the filmmaker.

Maybe the “lesbians in sport” stereotype is in play here, but Terry chuckles at recalling how naive and stand-offish she and a roommate/teammate were are “those other girls” who were up to who knows what.

There are stresses in the relationship in “A Secret Love,” but we root for them to be smoothed over. Perhaps Pat, “who never had to share Auntie Terry before” can be placated, Diana will dial down the (mostly polite, they are Canadian, after all) pushiness and “intervention,” and they’ve live as happily ever after as they’ve plainly lived all these years up until now.

Bolan gets a very sweet film out of a story where we never doubt, for a second, a happy ending.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, alcohol, adult themes

Cast: Terry Donahue, Pat Henschel, Diana Bolan

Credits: Directed by Chris Bolan, written by Chris Bolan and Alexa L. Fogel A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:21

You think you know Jeffrey Wright, character actor extraordinaire.

Yeah, he’s James Bond’s cynical, wry CIA intermediary Felix Leiter. He plays the guy who runs “Westworld” — a real technocrat.

Cops, scientists, government officials, family men, men in suits. Even when he’s a Caribbean money launderer (“The Laundromat”) there’s almost always a polish, an educated intelligence to go along with the sense of “cunning” implied when you cast him.

“AmhertsbMan.”

But if you follow him on twitter (@jfreewright) you get a hint of the other personas he can call on. He’s worth the follow just to read him reading the OG, streetwise riot act to racists, Hollywood haters and their ilk.

That Jeffrey Wright, on steroids, is who we get in “All Day and a Night,” an Oakland saga about generations passing their fury, grievances, criminal shortcuts, violence and the prison time that comes with that down, father to son to grandson.

The film, starring Ashton Sanders (“Moonlight”) as a rapper wannabe, hustler/mob-soldier in training, doesn’t show us much that we haven’t seen before. Maybe a little more back-story, a few extra pieces in the “motivation/how we got here” puzzle, all set to a sing-along gangsta rap (mostly) soundtrack. It’s depressingly over-familiar, or at least generic.

But Jeffrey Wright is scalding hot as the father to the young hood in a hoodie. He is TD, as in OG — a junkie/dealer who thinks beating his boy toughens him up for life as a black man in Oakland.

“It’s dog eat MAN out there,” he growls to his wife (Kelly Jenrette, who goes toe to toe, cheek to nose with him).

“By the time I was six, my Daddy’d been in jail nine times.”

A double-homicide and its consequences (trial and prison) frame this story. Jahkor (Sanders) shows “no remorse at all” in court after killing Malcolm (Stephen Barrington) and his wife in front of their little girl.

This is right after Malcolm thinks he might be able to talk his way out of this.

“We folks, right?”

The grim tale of how they got to that moment starts 13 years earlier, with Jahkor (Jalyn Hall) getting manhandled by an older teen — robbed — and then beaten by his father for letting it happen.

The cycle of revenge begins here. The lessons — that there’s safety in numbers, your “boys” have your back, and to never let any slight, insult or grievous wrong slide — are learned.

Jahkor grows up as a petty thief, disinterested in school, an only child his mother cannot control and his drug-addicted father is rarely around to raise. No, prison visits don’t count.

Jahkor and his “cuddy” (Bay Area “homie”) TQ (Isaiah John from TV’s “Snowfall”) stay thick as thieves, and harbor dreams of hip hop glory. “Jah” is transitioning from singing along to others’ raps with his girlfriend, Shantaye (Shakira Ja’nai Paye) in his Sentra, to cutting tracks. TQ is doing the recording.

Shantaye’s pregnancy has him deciding to straighten up altogether and find a legit job. He has a rap sheet — school suspensions for violence were just the start. But working in a mall athletic shoe store just exposes him to racial profiling by the white customers.

Targeting a mouthy suburban white teenage girl who talks a “gangsta” game, following her home to suburbia rob her and her beau with TQ, just gets them pulled over — “profiling” that uh, works? It prevented a robbery, even if there’s no arguing that her kind of “white people annoy the s— out of me.”

Even if the white cop crosses a line, noting the kid’s father, asking “Is it genetic?”

Writer-director Joe Robert Cole (one of the screenwriters of “Black Panther”) never lets the picture drift into “Hustle & Flow” — all about the hip hop. But the persistence of it on the soundtrack, Jah’s rhymes and the rhymes he, his friends and his girl sing along to, point to an association.

Rappers are passing along destructive rules of behavior from one generation to the next.

Prison is where ALL the generations connect, “whole neighborhoods” of “family” imprisoned together. And that’s where Jah spends the most time with his now-grizzled, longtime convict dad.

Cole gives us undeveloped hints of “another path” Jah might have followed, a relative who goes into the the military, of a grandmother who related more to his throw-up-her-hands teacher than his hotheaded mother (who storms out of a parent-teacher conference).

But what he focuses on is the crime and the gang rift that led to it.

If you’re not accustomed to the slang and patois used here, don’t be proud. Turn on the closed-captioning. That’s where Cole’s script shines, in the dialogue — an argument dismissed with “MISS me that s—!” You take a gang job or take a stance in the prison yard, than means, like a basketball center, you stand your ground — “post up.”

A gang leader, Big Stunna (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) has a brother he’s been leaning on.

“He upstate (imprisoned). I’m shorthanded. Marinate on that.”

Stunna is a foodie. I s— you not.

There’s a lot going on here, some of it good, some of clutter, too much of it voice-over narration, turning that lazy screenwriting device into annoying background noise.

Which is to say, “All Day and a Night” plays too long at two hours, but this being Netflix, we should be grateful they didn’t mini-series it.

Unless that meant more Jeffrey Wright.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, pervasive language, drug use and some sexual content/nudity

Cast: Ashton Sanders, Jeffrey Wright, Isaiah John, Shakira Ja’nai Paye and Kelly Jenrette

Credits: Written and directed by Joe Robert Cole. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:21

If Helen Mirren was the only choice to play the older, ruthless and legendarily libidinous Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, for HBO, how bold it is to give us Elle Fanning in a “How she got that way” series, “The Great,” for Hulu.

She’s been on the screen for a decade, is still only 22 and looks younger. And whatever her comic chops coming into the mini-series, she delivers the deadpan, the droll and and the withering put-downs with all the draw-blood style we’d expect of the empress who’d eventually depose her cruel fop of a husband, Peter III.

“”You’re not Great, are you?”

The former Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst might have felt the need to explain that to the Prussian born and raised Russian Czar. But even Peter III (Nicholas Hoult, wound up, over-the-top and farcically cruel) would get the “Peter the Great’s grandson isn’t all that” inference.

“The Great” compresses time and distorts history to stuff decades of educated, “enlightened” French-speaking Catherine’s too-early marriage, mistreatment by Peter and brutal experience in the Neanderthal Russian court she was hurled into. Her turn from sweet and naive to avenging Mother of all Russia must be preceded by a thousand injuries, insults and abject humiliations. Fanning suffers and schemes just well enough to suggest the not-to-be-trifled-with Czarina to come.

Hoult’s Peter is high-born low comedy personified — an impulsive vulgarian, heartless to the point of savagery, indulged like the despot he is.

“You looked taller in your portrait. Send her back and get me another one!”

It’s very like “The Tudors” in its cruelty, coarse language, vulgarity and sexuality, a bit of “Start the Revolution Without Me” in its royal randiness, funny fops and the like.

The contrast in the newlywed couple makes a grand running gag, her expectation that they’ll be “constant and caring all our lives,” his tactless, “She’s not an inbred, is she?”

The “our love is but an ember, a mere spark” idealism she brings to court may earn eyerolls from the cynically funny archbishop (Adam Godley) and snickers from us.

“I must blow on it until it bursts into passionate flame!”

But Peter’s idea of romance is rape, his notion of fidelity is to, well, keep it in the court, at least — the mistresses. A gift? A Russian bear, which he can just as monstrously take away. Her “literacy” is a failing to Peter’s circle.

“Women are for seeding, not reading!”

Catherine must make allies — the all-knowing maid Mariel (Phoebe Fox, seething and suffering), a demoted and humiliated former lady in waiting, young equally well-read men of court. She must try to escape. And failing that…

“How was your evening?”

“Avoided rape. Yours?”

“Huzzah!”

“The Great” spares no expense in its costumes and period detail, and the leads make splendid foils, worthy foes. The series was conceived by Tony McNamara, who scripted the deliciously cruel and comically dark Oscar winner “The Favourite.” This should dazzle and delight.

But I was stunned at how quickly one wearies of the grating tone, the excess, brutal sexual encounters played for laughs. Once we’ve seen it, we get it. But it’s not like they could get right down to the nitty gritty of plotting (failed) escapes and then scheming up revenge.

They’ve got ten hours to fill, after all. That’s a common gripe of the Golden Age of the Limited Series. Once we “get it,” “Ozark,” “Little Fires Everywhere,” “Tales from the Loop,” “Mrs. America,” “Hollywood” just keep going.

Repetition is a pitfall, even in the shows that dazzle (“Mrs. America”). Promising premises (“Hollywood”) are pummeled into submission.

While overlap isn’t an issue in a show that is truly episodic, airing once a week to become “destination TV,” dumped out all at once so you can weekend or quarantine with it just exposes the flab and the weaknesses of the story telling style.

Rare is the series that holds our attention and puts us into, “Well, let’s stop up and watch one more episode” mode. Maintaining that page-turner curiosity is the goal.

After a sparkling start, and despite all-in commitments from the leads, “The Great” turns sour and never really recovers that greatness.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Elle Fanning, Nicholas Hoult, Phoebe Fox.

Created by Tony McNamara. A Hulu series premiering May 15.

Running time: 10 episodes @1 hour each.

Monsters — racists, and other sorts of monsters — turn up in this ten episode “Green Book” style (horrific) road trip across America in the segregated 1950s.

Courtney B. Vance headlines the cast, listed at the link.

Looks “Watchmen” topical, and scary in all those Lovecraftian ways.

While Hollywood slept, Netflix took over the teen romantic comedy.

“The Kissing Booth,” “Tall Girl,”  “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” “Alex Strangelove,” “The Perfect Date” –all have streamed into our homes since the last decent high school romance hit theaters.

And “The Half of It” just adds to the list. It’s another “Cyrano de Bergerac” adapted to a modern school setting (“#Roxy” got there first). Touching and funny, awkward and wistful, it’s also evidence of a Hollywood crime.

It’s only the second feature film writer-director Alice Wu has gotten to make. The lesbian rom-com “Saving Face” was a gay film festival favorite over 16 years ago.

“Half of It” is similarly understated and under-sexualized, despite the sweeping changes in the culture of the past decade. But “understated” and subtle points any screen romance in the right direction.

It’s all about the longing, stupid.

Leah Lewis is Ellie Chu, a 17 year-old whose life in Squahamish, Washington, is solitary and literary, perhaps not by choice. She manages the railroad switchman’s apartment provided to her and her widowed dad (Collin Chou), who has let the loss of his wife and his inability to master English close-off his life.

The bills aren’t getting paid, which has led the smart girl the “cool kids” nickname “Chugga chugga CHU CHU” into writing duller kids’ papers and doing their homework for her — for cash.

But that’s not why “second string tight-end” Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer) to hassle her for help. He’s crushing on the prettiest girl in school, Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire). Ellie kind of gets that. Pretty girl is hard to make eye contact with for boys or girls. But being stressed and brittle and maybe a little bitter, she’s not writing love letters — “I thought’d it be romantic!” — for him.

“Get a thesaurus. And spellcheck. Good luck, Romeo!”

It isn’t pity for the monobrow that makes her agree to be his Cyrano, writing sweet nothings to slip into her locker and win her heart. She needs to pay the power bill.

“$50. One letter.”

That’s how it starts, cribbing sentiments from the old film romances (“Casablanca,” “Wings of Desire,” “The Philadelphia Story”) her dad watches, nonstop. But Aster is hip to the plagiarism, and calls “him” on it.

“It’s like a game,” Ellie decides. “She’s challenging us!”

So. Game on.

It happens slowly but totally, this tumble down the rabbit hole of “reconnaissance” — finding out Aster’s into art, old movies and “The Remains of the Day” — book and film.

“Oppo research” means checking out the popular dimpled, dimwitted jock Trig (Wolfgang Novogratz) Aster is linked to.

And keeping this all epistolary means Paul, via Ellie, can court Aster via a shared graffiti project (taking turns adding to a painting, each challenging the other as they do), dishing back and forth by letter as they do.

It also means Ellie’s sullen shell starts to soften. Paul’s not well-read, but he’s sweet. He’s the newest cook in the family sausage business, and figures his future’s “the sausage taco.”

Maybe that’s why his crush on Aster is so very deep — “She’s pretty, smart, never mean. And she smells like fresh ground flour!”

Paul gets past Ellie’s curt description of her mother — “Young. Funny. Dead.” But what he’s not seeing is how she’s forgetting to charge him, how into this she is, how she might be talking to her one reliable confidante in life, that one special teacher (Betty Ann Baker) about “this one person who ‘gets’ me.”

She’s not talking about Paul, or Trig either.

The stage-managing of Aster and Paul’s “dates” via text, the back and forth of the letters and texts, the reluctant prep for the “mandatory” senior “talent show” participation, all give away Ellie’s game.

All this “longing” she’s writing letters, lecturing Paul and narrating interior monologues about? It’s hers.

There are more laugh-out-loud moments in this 100 minute than in that entire high school sitcom that Mindy Kaling did for Netflix. And “Half of It” is, if anything, more inclusive than Kaling’s series “Never Have I Ever.”

The one-liners are smarter and fresher. Agnostic Ellie plays the organ at Aster’s dad’s church. “This whole TOWN fears God,” teacher Mrs. Geselschap (Baker) cracks. “You know who GOD fears? The teacher’s union!”

Ellie whispers her last instructions to Paul before “the big date” in a high school huddle form that he can understand. “Are. You. READY?”

But the standout feature of “The Half of It” is the emotional nature of the script, and emotional accessibility of the performances. No, nobody here is high school age (Lewis has been working as an actress since 2005). But you forget that when you see how Ellie loses herself in Aster’s eyes.

What don’t work are several tropes of the genre. The football story thread is played, the “senior talent show” bit feels phony, but redeems itself via brevity.

And as cute as the quotes from Plato and Satre and Oscar Wilde are that introduce each “chapter” in the story, we’re over them long before they’re over.

But Wu has relaunched her career (hopefully) by managing what many a Netflix teen rom-com filmmaker aims for, not a grand slam, but a solid, uplifting stand-up triple.

Considering the age of cast, she might get a (college years) sequel out of “The Half of It,” if nothing else.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief language and teen drinking.

Cast: Leah Lewis, Daniel Diemer, Alexxis Lemire, Collin Chou, Becky Ann Baker, Wolfgang Novogratz

Credits: Written and directed by Alice Wu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44