Now Showing: Material Girl

 

Material Girl

Genre: Biography/Drama/Music

Director: Alma Har'el

Writer: Diane Esposito

Cast: Chloe Grace Moretz, Diego Boneta, Dylan O'Brien, Joe Alwyn, Algee Smith, Johnny Galecki, Jovan Adepo, Lamorne Morris

Plot: A Greyhound bus comes to a stop in Midtown Manhattan. Madonna Louise Ciccone (Chloe Grace Moretz) steps off wearing a thrifted trench coat and fingerless gloves, clutching a duffel bag, with just $35 in her pocket. The streets are gray, loud, full of punk kids and disco queens. She walks fast, dodging piles of garbage and men catcalling from construction scaffolding. That night, she crashes in a loft in Alphabet City with a dancer she met once. Madonna scans the skyline from the roof with unblinking focus. She lights a cigarette and watches the lights of the Chrysler Building shimmer in the distance. She mutters that one day the whole city will know her name.

A dive-bar gig leads her to Dan Gilroy (Joe Alwyn), a guitarist with charm and no plan. They start sleeping together almost immediately. Within weeks, he’s invited her to front his struggling new wave band, the Breakfast Club. She moves into an abandoned synagogue in Queens where the group has rigged a DIY recording studio with wires dangling like vines. She sleeps in a sleeping bag on the floor next to Dan, but bosses everyone around in rehearsals. Madonna scrawls lyrics in composition books, demanding more synth, more edge, more sex appeal. The band grumbles, but she brings energy no one else can fake. She cuts off the drummer mid-set one night and screams that he plays like a corpse. Dan tries to calm her down, but she shuts him up with a kiss. The band plays again, tighter.

While Dan believes he’s her muse, Madonna is slipping away to Harlem nights with Stephen Bray (Algee Smith), her ex from Michigan. He’s now drumming for a funk act and trying to break into production. They hook up in stairwells and walk-ups, sweat and vinyl records mixing in the dark. He plays her beats on a TASCAM recorder and she nods along, already calculating what she can build out of them. Madonna keeps the relationships separate, neither man knowing the other is still in the picture. At one point, she pretends to be sick to skip a gig with the band—only to be seen the same night dancing at a club with Stephen. She laughs it off when Dan confronts her, calling it networking.

Madonna tags along to a music showcase Dan’s brother sets up in a tiny bar. They go on after a ska act. No one pays attention as she sings a new song—half-finished, bold, abrasive. A guy in the front row yawns. Another throws a crumpled napkin that lands at her feet. Dan wants to pack up. Madonna throws the napkin back into the crowd and finishes the set with twice the fire. Afterward, she sits alone on a curb outside while the band loads gear, staring straight ahead. A cab splashes her shoes.

Months drag on with no record deal, just flyers and empty clubs. Madonna storms out of a rehearsal after Dan questions her lyrics. She heads straight to Stephen’s place but ends up leaving there too as she carries the fight to him. That same night, she trashes her demo tape. She yanks the reel out of the machine, rips the tape out with her teeth, and tosses it across the room. Then she grabs a bottle of peach schnapps and walks through the empty streets of Queens until the sun comes up. By midmorning, she’s broken into an unused back room of the synagogue with a borrowed 4-track and lays down three new tracks in one sitting

In the synagogue-turned-studio, Dan watches Madonna record a rough vocal. She keeps stopping, yelling at the band. He suggests they take a break. She snaps - says breaks are for people who aren’t going anywhere. He quietly records over one of her early demos later that night. She finds out, screams at him, and walks out. He tries to apologize, saying he was just trying to make space on the reel. She spits back that space is for weak men - and she’s not dragging his corpse up the ladder with her.

Stephen invites Madonna to a basement jam session in Brooklyn where he’s laying down a track for another singer. Madonna sits in the corner, unimpressed by the girl in the booth. Later, during a cigarette break, she whispers to Stephen that the girl’s pitch is garbage—and she could do it better. Her hand slides down the front of his pants before he can answer. Stephen laughs nervously, trying to remind her they’re not even a couple. She tells him they never were. The girl is gone the next day.

Madonna starts haunting Danceteria, the famed multilevel dance club where fashion, queerness, and nihilism collide. She flirts her way into the DJ booth with Mark Kamins (Dylan O'Brien), whose cocaine-dusted record crates give him access to every record label in Manhattan. They sleep together within a week. One night, still naked in his loft, she tries to convince him to bring her demo to Seymour Stein at Sire Records. She does a line of cocaine and tells him to get her a meeting or she'll find someone else who will. When he is still hesitant, Madonna thumbs through his address book and dials the number herself, tossing the phone to Kamins.

Seymour Stein (Johnny Galecki) hears the demo from a hospital bed - he’s recovering from a heart procedure. Madonna bursts into his room in fishnets and a ripped tee, plays “Everybody” on a boombox, and dances beside his IV drip like it’s Studio 54. She leaves with a deal for three singles and the option for an album. Later, as nurses change his IV, Seymour smirks and predicts that Madonna is gonna eat this whole town alive - and he just gave her the knife.

“Everybody” hits the clubs hard - Fun House, Paradise Garage, even gay clubs in Jersey. Madonna does promo in lace gloves and leopard print, mimicking Marilyn Monroe with punker edge. She starts seeing Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jovan Adepo), who watches her dance with an amused smirk. His loft is full of canvases and empty wine bottles. She circles one of his half-finished canvases and says it’s derivative. He tells her she rhymes like a child. They fuck hard, then smoke in silence under flickering fluorescents. He gives her a small painting and she tells him she’ll hang it in the bathroom. He laughs, but his smile fades.

Sire assigns producer Reggie Lucas (Lamorne Morris) to record her full album, but nothing gels. Reggie wants polished R&B grooves; Madonna wants raw edge. Sessions spiral into arguments over basslines and vocal takes. She walks out mid-session one afternoon and doesn’t come back for days. Reggie finishes the mixes without her, but she hates the final result. She tells Stein she’s fixing it - with or without permission. Seymour chuckles and jokingly asks Madonna not to bankrupt him. She replies that she'll do the exact opposite.

At Fun House, she watches DJ John "Jellybean" Benitez (Diego Boneta) cut between disco, Latin freestyle, and electro with surgical precision. She corners him in the booth, slides her cassette across the turntables, and seductively tells him to make it work. He does. They begin reworking the tracks—"Holiday," "Lucky Star," "Borderline." Their chemistry in the studio bleeds into the bedroom. Jellybean falls hard. Madonna stays distant, focused, rewriting hooks mid-kiss. Jellybean is exhausted, working day and night re-mixing the songs, while Madonna is out clubbing until dawn. He asks her if she is really serious. She tells him that going to the clubs is what put the two of them together in the first place.

A small solo show of Basquiat’s opens at a SoHo gallery. Madonna arrives alone, sunglasses on indoors.  The room is buzzing - buyers, curators, dealers. A Japanese collector tries to talk Basquiat into selling a piece from the show floor. Basquiat sees Madonna across the room and makes his way over, holding a glass of red wine. They circle each other. She stares at a piece titled KING OF NOWHERE — aggressive lines, childlike crowns, scratched text scrawled across it. Later, they’re alone in a back hallway, kissing aggressively, pressed against a wall beside stacked shipping crates. She tears one of his flyers in half. He watches her leave again. 

After hours at Danceteria, Mark Kamins watches the DJ booth as Madonna dances alone on the floor — eyes closed, arms in the air, totally lost in the music. But it’s not one of his tracks she’s dancing to. It’s “Holiday,” remixed by another DJ he doesn’t recognize. Later, in the alley behind the club, Kamins lights a cigarette. Madonna comes out laughing, tugging her coat on. She doesn’t notice him at first. When she does, she smirks. He comments on the new version of "Holiday". She gives him a dismissive kiss on the cheek.

When her self-titled album drops, “Holiday” climbs into the Billboard Top 20. She’s on American Bandstand, in Interview Magazine, and dancing on speakers in lace and crucifixes. Teenage girls across the country start copying her look - bleach, mesh, rubber bracelets. She becomes a phenomenon without needing to explain a thing. 

Madonna attends a record release party thrown by Sire in a Manhattan loft. Seymour, tipsy on champagne, grabs a mic and tells the crowd he signed her from a hospital bed and now she’s gonna pay for his next five. She rolls her eyes and laughs, kisses his cheek for the cameras. Later, she pulls him aside and tells him she wants more control over her next project. Seymour points out that she took control the minute she kicked open his hospital room door.

Madonna walks through Bloomingdale's on a shopping spree. She stops at a display and sees her face in a stack of teen magazines. When the other customers start to recognize her, Madonna blows a bubble with gum and playfully pops it.

In her new downtown apartment, Madonna lies in bed at 3PM, sunlight cutting through slatted blinds. The room is filled with unopened boxes of gifts, designer clothes, letters. She flips through a pile of press clippings, none of them really read. In the silence, she hums to herself and starts writing lyrics on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt. She stops, crosses them out, starts again.

Jellybean proposes in a restaurant in SoHo. She breaks up with him the next morning in a cab, says she doesn’t do weddings. Jellybean tries to return her demo reels; she tells him to keep them. When he asks if it was ever real, she simply replies that he was useful. She fires him from producing her second album. He accuses her of being a machine. She smiles as if that’s the best compliment he’s ever given her. He looks like he wants to vomit. She leans in, voice low. Says she was pregnant - maybe his. Doesn’t matter. She took care of it last week. He stares, wrecked. She tells him not to be dramatic - it would’ve ruined everything for her. He storms off, throwing the demo reels onto the ground. A doorman silently sweeps the reels up later, not sure what they are.

A sea of flashbulbs pop as Madonna struts into the MTV VMAs in a white wedding dress and bustier. “Like a Virgin” blasts across the venue as she rolls on the floor, veil fluttering. In the wings, a line of dancers waits to meet her. She doesn’t notice. She’s busy adjusting her bracelets. “Material Girl” cues up, louder than everything else. Backstage, she passes a TV monitor playing her performance on delay. She watches herself roll across the stage, veil trailing. Someone behind her says it is absolutely iconic. She keeps walking, smiling to herself.