The exuberant star-making performance of Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Scream) in the title role of Sean Baker’s new film, Anora, is getting a lot of attention, as it should. But all the characters and performances are so vivid and lively, they make the whole movie an exhilarating experience.

Writer-director Baker’s longtime commitment to independent filmmaking, evident in all his films including the most recent, Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017), results in class-conscious movies focused on the lives of marginalized characters. They’re mostly working-class people struggling to realize some version of the American dream, though they’re coming at it from disadvantaged starting points.

I almost teared up writing that, it’s so rare and valuable a commitment.

Baker is someone who knows what social realism is and can use it in a sentence in interviews and discuss how he’s drawing upon that movement in his own filmmaking, often in combination with Hollywood film influences he also loves. Even better, he knows he doesn’t want to represent the lives of hard-pressed people drably:

I know if I had somebody make a film about my life, I wouldn’t want it to look just gray and drab. Even when I’m going through hard times, I still see color, I still see beauty. And I think that we tried to reflect that in the style of the film. We find the color out there.

On the other hand, respecting the harshness of working-class realities in America, Baker doesn’t deal in facile happy endings. The exhilaration of watching his films is bound up in his insightful and compassionate view of his struggling characters’ lives, which includes a clear-eyed look at the lack of bright, life-transforming opportunities available to them. Living to fight another day with spirited defiance is triumph enough in Baker’s movies.

And he’s successful enough now with Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival — where he dedicated his award to “all sex workers, past, present, and future” — that it’s obvious his films are finding ever more appreciative audiences.

Anora is getting glowing reviews everywhere it’s played since Cannes, making it clear that Baker can finally plan with some sense of security what films he wants to make next. As the fifty-three-year-old notes after thirty years of hustling to make indie films, “Up until fairly recently, I was struggling to pay rent.”

Yet he seems genuinely indifferent to moving on to big-time, big-budget filmmaking in Hollywood, using Anora as a launching pad, which is the most common result of indie directors getting a taste of mainstream success. Instead, the success of Anora means doubling down on doing the kind of movies he loves: “It’s not about opening doors. It’s certainly not about trying to get into the studio. To tell you the truth, it does the exact opposite. It says: OK, good. Now we can continue to do this.”

Anora is a comedy-drama about a vivacious young Russian American woman who prefers “Ani” as her Americanized name and works as an exotic dancer and sex worker at a Manhattan club. Among her many clients one night is the twenty-one-year-old Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), son of a Russian oligarch so rich and powerful, if you Google him, you get eye-popping results.

Vanya is the type of young man who’s still goofy and childlike; when he runs to answer the door in his socks, he gathers momentum so he can skid the last few feet. He’s currently on a spree trying to get the most hedonistic bang for his buck during his last week in America before he has to return to Russia and go to work for his dad. He and Anora have such a good time in their first sexual encounters — “God bless America!” he exclaims during one — that he invites her to come with him for a week-long party binge in Las Vegas.

The good times keep rolling in Vegas, with the emphasis on hot sex and every luxury wild spending can buy, to the point that Vanya — very reluctant to return to Russia and go to work — asks Anora to marry him. It means American citizenship, for one thing. Anora, who’s cheerfully assertive about the transactional nature of her relationships to clients (which, after all, only reflect the transactional nature of so much of American society), hesitates for a minute over this casual proposal. She can’t quite articulate it, but she’d rather not joke about this — it comes too close to her lifelong dream, which is typically American and includes a honeymoon at Disneyland.

Going to Disneyland as a working-class dream beyond the reach of many is more central to Baker’s previous film, The Florida Project. In it, families scrabbling to make the rent in a cheap but colorful residence motel, ironically named the Magic Kingdom, live in the shadow of the famous and expensive theme park that they can’t afford to go to. It ends with a fantasy sequence of two little girls running away from family traumas all the way to the Magic Kingdom in Florida’s Disney World, in fast-motion, unimpeded.

Baker consistently represents what the American Dream means to people who have no easy access to any version of it. In Anora, the fantasy of a wealthy client sweeping a sex worker away from the literal grind of lap dances and economic precarity to a life of luxury and ease clearly overwhelms Anora’s usually savvy response to the world. When Vanya makes a more solemn marriage proposal, it’s simply an irresistible offer given her circumstances, and she accepts. After their impulsive wedding at the Little White Chapel, they return to Vanya’s fabulous place in New York City, where wedded bliss comes to an abrupt halt.

Vanya’s parents, having heard rumors of his marriage to a sex worker, let Vanya know they’re flying their private plane to America to put a stop to his latest escapade. While they’re in the air, three henchmen in New York City that Vanya’s parents employ to contain his habitual hijinks have been dispatched to the family mansion, an advance guard ordered to get Vanya under control, get the marriage annulled, and get rid of Anora.

It was inevitable, the audience knows, this immediate deployment of the forces of the rich to stop the poor from sharing in their bounty. But Anora hadn’t reckoned on this brutal attack on her fantasy-come-true.

The shift to Act Two is wonderful in that the situation suddenly gets both serious and extremely funny simultaneously. Vanya’s father is formidable, and Vanya’s mother is scarier still, and the two Armenian handlers (played by Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan) who are in charge of managing Vanya’s excesses are a haplessly funny duo who are terrified of their employers and liable to act rashly out of desperation. And they’ve brought real muscle with them — the quiet and focused Russian henchman Igor (Yura Borisov) who looks like he knows several ways to kill a person with silent efficiency.

However, they’re not allowed to hurt Vanya, just hold him, and in addition, they’re supposed to compel Anora to fall into line without actual physical violence. Everyone figures it will be no challenge to intimidate this “little girl.” But none of them have reckoned on Vanya’s escape artist abilities or Anora’s indignant rage and athleticism. An extended screwball comedy sequence ensues as all three enforcers find out to their sorrow that pole dancing builds serious muscle and agility.

Her steadfast refusal to give up what she regards as fairly hers makes them aware of their own wearying roles as hirelings for the wealthy, who task them with endless dirty work. “He betrayed you,” says lead handler Toros (Karagulian) of Vanya, trying to persuade Anora to cooperate through a show of solidarity. “And he betrayed us, too!”

Act Three becomes ever more serious as the search for Vanya is on and grim pressure is brought to bear on Anora to give up her claim on him. The ending of the film has remarkable cumulative power.

Really, I can’t recommend enough this utterly refreshing film, which nimbly moves in and out of genre elements and narrative expectations without ever sinking into triteness. The characters are so fully realized, you can genuinely forget they’re not real people — their exploits are so engrossing, you can’t wait to see what they’ll do next.

The other breakout star in this film besides Madison should be Borisov, who’s already famous in Russia. As Igor, he’s silent for most of the film, but so compelling you find yourself watching his craggy face and attentive stances even when he’s in the background of shots in which all sorts of dramatics are foregrounded. As he begins to look at Anora differently, first with slight surprise and then with increasing regard, he becomes the unlikeliest and yet the most charismatic romantic leading man seen in films in ages.

We’re living in a degraded era, when bland dullard John Krasinski is on the cover of People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue, a perfect representative of the vapidity and low wattage of nearly everyone Hollywood offers up as alluring — and Hollywood used to be good at this! Watching Madison and Borisov is a reminder of the old-time thrill of fresh, exciting, and revelatory talent.

Hurry to see Anora while it’s still in theaters. You will thank me for this recommendation!