Continuing the recent mini-boom in dramas about women forming criminal gangs — a trend that includes Widows and The Kitchen — filmmaker Lorene Scafaria’s latest picture, Hustlers, dramatizes real-life events that occurred in New York City, beginning just over a decade ago. According to “The Hustlers at Scores,” a nonfiction article by Jessica Pressler upon which writer-director Scafaria based her screenplay, a group of strippers devised a risky scheme to rob wealthy clients, amassing huge amounts of cash until they were caught.

My eyes are up here

 Among the inherent challenges Scafaria faced while crafting Hustlers was telling a story about hypersexualized women in a non-exploitive way. Obviously, Scafaria had the great advantage of useful facts from the true story, inasmuch as the women in question were “empowered” by way of their criminal activities. Yet there’s no getting around the seedy milieu of Hustlers, or the fact that every prominent actress in the film ends up half-naked and gyrating at some point.

Accordingly, the question is whether it’s possible to serve two very different masters — feminism and titillation — at the same time.

Smartly, Scafaria eases viewers into the stripping world through the eyes of Dorothy (Constance Wu) at a time when Dorothy has not yet attained swagger. In the first scene, she navigates the main floor at a club, trying to tempt odious men into buying private dances. Scafaria compels viewers to regard stripping from the vantage point of a woman who finds sex work humiliating, an effective means of neutralizing eroticism.

Building on this important first scene, Scafaria introduces Dorothy’s future mentor, Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), as a sort of strip-club superhero. Pole-dancing with remarkable agility and strength, Ramona puts on such a dazzling show that money seems to rain from the sky as customers go wild during her performance. Her control over the situation seems as absolute as Dorothy’s lack of control.

By putting these two attitudes into conversation with each other — Dorothy’s wariness and Ramona’s wiliness — Scafaria all but requires that viewers take the stripper characters seriously as people, rather than sexual objects.

Takeaway: Early scenes can be used to ask viewers to regard a particular story through a particular lens.

The right to be wrong

 After establishing the friendship between Dorothy and Ramona, as well as the world of the strip club and the women who dance there, Scafaria transitions to the criminal enterprise that gives the story its danger and drive. Following the 2008 stock market crash, business at the club nosedives until Ramona starts “fishing” for deep-pocketed clients. In this scheme, Ramona and other dancers target affluent men at bars, then persuade the men to visit the strip club and spend recklessly, unaware that the women get a cut of the club’s profits from these customers.

Eventually, Ramona proposes escalating the scheme by drugging the men and going wild with their credit cards, assuming that A) these guys can afford to lose money, and B) the victims will be too embarrassed afterward to pursue justice. Dorothy helps Ramona put the scheme into motion, but every so often her conscience surfaces, at which point Ramona provides cold-blooded pep talks.

In Ramona’s view, the men they victimize — most of whom are stockbrokers — benefited from financial misdeeds prior to the market crash, so their money was probably stolen from innocent victims. As an exercise in moral relativism, this logic is highly dubious, but it fits the worldview that Ramona articulates at a crucial moment: “The system is rigged,” she says, “and it does not reward people who play by the rules.”

Whether Ramona’s philosophy resonates with the audience doesn’t matter (though of course the movie gains traction if it does). What matters is that Scafaria, in the course of transforming Ramona from a real-life inspiration to a vibrant movie character, invested her with a point of view. Characters who live by their own rules tend to make strong impressions, and that’s one reason why Lopez has already gained Oscar® buzz for Hustlers — a vivid character provides the foundation for a vivid performance.

Takeaway: Distinctive characters often articulate strong personal beliefs.

A matter of time

While it would have been easy to present Hustlers in a linear fashion, tracking characters from the legality of stripping to the illegality of robbery, Scafaria instead employs a structure that visits several different time periods.

The movie opens in 2007, when Dorothy meets Ramona. Then, just when it seems as if the picture has settled into a straight-ahead groove, Scafaria cuts to a scene in 2014, when Dorothy — now long removed from the skin trade — recalls her experiences to a reporter named Elizabeth (Julia Stiles). Having thus established the story’s ability to move through time, Scafaria gives herself license to play all sorts of narrative games, so she eventually integrates flashbacks to events before 2007 as well as vignettes of important events between 2007 and 2014, namely the crime spree. Cleverly, Scafaria provides a satisfying ending to the past-tense storyline that began in 2007, followed by an even more satisfying ending to the present-tense storyline that occurs entirely in 2014.

Some stories beg for unvarnished presentation. Action pictures often (but not always) work best with linear narratives and tight timeframes, the better to build and maintain tension. Conversely, biographical pictures frequently benefit from wraparound structures, juxtaposing the latter stages of a character’s life with early formative experiences.

True-crime stories like Hustlers fit comfortably into nonlinear structures for several reasons. First, bouncing through time helps justify the condensation of repetitive events (e.g., committing the same type of crime over and over again). Second, moving through time permits the storyteller to demonstrate that a pattern of behavior stretches over months or years. And third, using a nonlinear structure allows for the crucial element of perspective. In the case of Hustlers, we watch Dorothy’s journey not just through the blurry vision with which she saw her crimes while committing them, but also through the older (and hopefully wiser) vision with which she reconsiders her sordid past.

Takeaway: Juxtaposing past and present allows characters (and viewers) to study events with hindsight.