Various women dance at the strip club Blue Iguana. Angel (Daryl Hannah) is desperate to adopt. Jo (Jennifer Tilly) is angry, pregnant and wants an abortion. Jasmine (Sandra Oh) is a poetry writer. Club manager Eddie gets star stripper Nico (Kristin Bauer van Straten). Jessie (Charlotte Ayanna) is the new girl. Stormy (Sheila Kelley) is sleeping with her brother.

Michael Radford is no drive-by B-movie director. This does have ambition of something more compelling than a simple T&A showcase. He has gathered various stripper stories together. They're fine but I don't find any of them that compelling. The movie feels scattered. I wonder if somebody who actually stripped like Diablo Cody would have more compelling stories. At least, her writing might be more interesting.

The dramas of some strip-dancers in a nightclub called Blue Iguana are the theme of this movie. Angel (Daryl Hannah) is a dancer wishing to adopt a child. Stormy (Sheila Kelley) is a dancer with a secret with her brother Sully (Elias Koteas). Jasmine (Sandra Oh) is a poetess who fells in love with Dennis (Chris Hogan). Jo (Jennifer Tilly) is a dancer who became pregnant and Jessie (Charlotte Ayanna) is a woman fighting to survive in Hollywood. The link between them is the fact that they dance at Blue Iguana, a strip-club managed by Eddie (Robert Wisdom).

This movie is not a bad movie, but the shallow dramas of each dancer are not enough to support the story in a higher level. A woman who decides to work as a strip-dancer certainly has had some trouble in her past (or present). The viewer has a chance to see beautiful breasts, butts and naked bodies of many beautiful actresses, especially Charlotte Ayanna, Sheila Kelley and Daryl Hannah. The fat of Jennifer Tilly is justified since her character is pregnant. On the DVD, the director Michael Radford explains that when he joined the actors and actresses, there was no screenplay. The cast developed each character and this type of creative activity seems to be very unique. Further, on DVD there is a documentary directed by Daryl Hannah showing how she developed the character of Angel that is worthwhile. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Divas do Blue Iguana" ("Divas of the Blue Iguana")

Daryl Hannah is so adept at playing spacy little cupcakes that it's hard to discern at first whether she's doing anything new or challenging in "Dancing at the Blue Iguana". Her character, Angel--as with ALL the characters in the film--is half-realized and indifferently treated by the director, yet Hannah pulls off one amazing moment in the movie: Angel is almost arrested by a friendly cop who stops to take her picture but finds marijuana in her car. It's just a throwaway moment for the filmmakers, who don't allow the sequence to lead anywhere, but Daryl is dead-on here in her impersonation of a child-like waif who seems to make a conscious decision to use her ditzy naivete to her advantage. She broke my heart! Also good: Sandra Oh as would-be poetess Jasmine and Jennifer Tilly as a hard-partying stripper who roars through her day until she's out of gas. The film rambles, it has no shape, it has many embarrassing and/or awkward moments, and it's filled with disgusting language. But there are some thoughtful, sad passages that strive to "reveal" something about the seamy side of life which maybe we as moviegoers might not have seen before. I found something like "Smithereens" to be more truthful, but I did find "Iguana" to be intriguing on a minor level. ** from ****