What if Pretty Woman, but realistic? That’s the simplest way to introduce Anora, a wonderful new film from the director Sean Baker, who specializes in small movies about down-at-the-heels Americans who make their own bad luck. I don’t mean that it’s realistic in a purely negative way — that it strips out the romance and star power and comedy from the Julia Roberts blockbuster and just serves up a grim story about the dark world of prostitution. Rather, it’s realistic in that it starts with a similar concept and figures out how to make you laugh, make you root for some form of romance, and make its female lead a star, just as Pretty Woman did — all while setting its story about a working girl and her wealthy john on planet Earth instead of planet fantasy, and making the arc of the romance seem at once sexy, sad, and true.

The working girl is the Anora of the title, played by Mikey Madison, who goes by Ani while plying her trade as an exotic dancer at a New York club and shuttling home to a shabby outer-borough townhome that she shares with her older sister. One fateful night, a “whale” comes in, a youthful Russian named Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) looking for a good time with a girl who speaks his native language — which Ani does a bit thanks to her grandmother, a facility that gets her summoned by her boss and handed over to young Ivan, who is spastic and naïve and horny and soon obsessed with her.

That obsession drags her out of the stripper’s life and into a whirlwind of being his (paid) girlfriend — an energetic cycle of sex and video games and drinking and partying and more sex and then sleeping it all off while a team of maids cleans up. The maids are there because Ivan is the son of a powerful Russian oligarch, hanging out in his father’s very modern Brooklyn-on-the-water mansion, having a good time with fellow rich brats and local Russian expats. But his absent parents expect him to return to Mother Russia and the family business, which Ivan would prefer to avoid. And which maybe he could avoid, with a green card, which might be obtained through a marriage, and what better time than a wild weekend trip to Las Vegas . . . ?

That’s act 1, and it’s a testament to the skill of Baker, Madison, and Eydelshteyn that the movie makes the basic facts of the situation clear — Ivan’s total immaturity, above all — and makes Ani reasonably worldly-wise, and yet still shows how she could get caught up in the whirlwind and actually believe, for a little while, that this might really be a fairy tale, that a sordid beginning could have the most romantic end.

Which is the necessary setup to the next stage, the unraveling, when the men the oligarch has assigned to watch Ivan figure out what their charge has done and show up on his doorstep, bent on getting an annulment signed as fast as possible.

There are three of them, a troika whose touch of menace gives way soon enough to flailing buffoonery: the family fixer Toros (Karren Karagulian), who is pulled out of serving as a godfather at an Orthodox baptism by the news; the hapless Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), who lets Ivan flee the house and disappear into the general Brighton Beach area; and Igor (Yura Borisov), the more youthful muscle, who is assigned to subdue Ani and ends up, over the course of their wanderings in search of Ivan, as the only character who really sympathizes with her.

No longer an Ivan–Ani duet, the movie becomes a conflict, a test of wills, pitting the henchmen who have some power but little competence against Ani, who is seemingly weak but has the stronger will and the legal trump card — she really is married, they need her consent to legally unmake the union, brute force can only go so far, and anyway they aren’t actually brutish enough to overcome her resistance.

How the advantages of willfulness and legal legitimacy fare when tested against the stronger power of Ivan’s parents, who show up for the third act, I will leave to the viewer to discover. Suffice to say that I don’t think you will regret the journey. Anora is a rare movie where everything works as intended: the performances, the dialogue, the humor, the slapstick, the cinema verité of the various restaurants and clubs where the henchmen go looking for the lost heir, the stark visuals of a wintry Coney Island boardwalk, the snow that falls like a benediction over the final scenes.

It’s certainly Baker’s best movie. As of this writing, with just a little left of 2024, I think it’s the best movie of the year.