In January 2021, it was announced that the Tony-award winning performer Sarah Jones was due to make her directorial debut with a documentary about and inspired by her Off-Broadway one-woman show “Sell/Buy/Date,” in which she explored different characters’ relationships to the sex industry. The splashy announcement also included that Meryl Streep, Rashida Jones and Laverne Cox were set to serve as executive producers on the film. (Streep previously produced Jones’ Tony-winning production “Bridge & Tunnel.”)
Pretty big deal for a New York stage performer who got her start performing slam poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. But the star-studded announcement drew outrage online from vocal sex workers and advocates, and within a day, Cox had pulled out of the project. (Rashida Jones would also later depart.) So what do you do when your film gets cancelled for its ideology before it’s even been made?
Jones went meta with it, turning the conflict into, well, the main conflict of the film adaptation of “Sell/Buy/Date,” which is a hybrid scripted comedy-documentary or “unorthodoc” as it’s billed. Though the film opens with mention of the outrage that said Jones “should be canceled as an outsider for telling stories that aren’t hers to tell,” this is not a film about Jones confronting any haters, but rather, meeting the criticism head-on.
Jones makes her interviews with current and former sex workers the meat of the story itself, as she sets off on a journey from New York to Los Angeles to Las Vegas in a heightened re-enactment of what she grapples with while trying to decide to make this movie — and more importantly, how to make this movie.
With Jones on the journey is the entourage of characters she plays. This includes Bella, a super-woke Gen Z white girl; Nereida, a Dominican woman with a sassy mouth; Lorraine, an aging Jewish bubbe; and Rashid, a Brooklyn cab driver. Jones also includes her mother Dr. Leslie Farrington in the film, because one of the emotional through-lines is the personal grief she’s working through regarding her sister Naomi’s death.
A doc-comedy hybrid, a cast of five characters played by one actor, a dramatized trip, celebrity cameos (say hello to Ilana Glazer, Rosario Dawson and Bryan Cranston) and a piercing and personal exploration into whether the sex industry is empowering or exploitative? Jones almost bites off more than she can chew with this project – but somehow, it works.
Even though the one-woman/five-character gambit feels theatrical and much more suited to the stage, the way that Jones inhabits each character’s voice and mannerisms — and distinguishes their points of view — actually helps to externalize the warring voices in her head. She’s not presenting herself as an objective arbiter of facts, collecting data to present a concrete answer of what’s right and wrong. Jones is a human being with a personal stake in the sex-work debate: She’s a woman of color with a multi-racial lineage, a grieving sister and a person who wants to believe in the possibilities of the liberating power of sex work. She brings that specificity of subjectivity to the work. The different characters help to give voice to all the conflict she feels about the topic and allows us to watch her work through it.
Though there are elements of “Sell/Buy/Date” that feel a bit contrived, and the style is serviceable at best, the charm of the film and its brilliance comes from watching Jones work out her complicated, complex and conflicted thoughts about sex work and the sex industry over the course of the film’s run time. In a world where discourse is flattened into hyperbolic hot takes and Twitter-main-character dunk-a-thons, it’s a rare and, frankly, beautiful thing to watch the process of someone seeking answers, asking questions and listening to lived experience before coming to her own conclusions.
In doing so, Jones gives voice to many different sides of the debate, represented by sex worker and advocate Lotus Lain, pole-dancing attorney Amy Bond, sex-work survivor Esperanza Fonseca, brothel owner and decriminalization advocate Alice Little, musician and IsMyGirl founder Evan Seinfeld and indigenous activists Jennifer Marley, Becki Jones and Terria Xo, who all present valid, informed and personal viewpoints on the issue. In the end, it’s left up to Jones and the audience to form their own opinions.
Jones has taken what was so “cancellable” about her in the first place — that she doesn’t have lived experience as a sex worker — and turned it into the text of the film herself, as she seeks out personal truths from those who have lived the life. That doesn’t mean that Jones shies away from presenting her own point of view, and in fact, when she finally does reveal her own story, and the conclusion at which she’s arrived after her journey, it lands even more powerfully.
Jones sets out to find out if sex work is empowering, but what she discovers, and what we are reminded of over the course of “Sell/Buy/Date,” is that vulnerability and sharing your story, in whatever form that takes, is the most empowering way to be in the world.
“Sell/Buy/Date” opens in US theaters Oct. 14 and on demand Nov. 1 via Cinedigm.