The director Sean Baker has, in recent years, been moving closer toward what one might call the mainstream. His films—which are not generally driven by big movie stars or hooky genre trappings—have maintained their idiosyncratic ramble, their interest in lives on the fringes of American society. But in 2021’s Red Rocket and in his new film Anora, Baker is working in a more broadly accessible comedic tone and tempo. It suits him, even if a little of his earlier scrappiness is missed.

What’s thankfully still in play is Baker’s sensitivity to the humanity behind the antics. Anora, which premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21, is in line with something like Uncut Gems, a kinetic race through a New York City rarely seen on film. It’s a wild, profane blast. But Baker is also zooming in, very slowly, so that in the movie’s startling, disarming final scene we are forced to reconsider what we’ve just watched. Was it a raucous chase movie or a quiet tragedy?

The title character, who prefers to be called Ani, is a sex worker (played by Mikey Madison) who strips at a Manhattan club and does the occasional house call on the side. She’s a native of the Russian enclave that is Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and can speak a little of the language. So when a Russian client is brought to the club, Ani is tasked with entertaining him. Rather than some menacing gangster or piggish old oligarch, the customer is a wiry kid, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn). He’s friendly and generous; Ani immediately takes a shine to him, and he to her. After a few paid-for hangs at Ivan’s waterfront mansion (well, it’s his family’s place), Ivan makes a decent proposal to this pretty woman. She will earn $15,000 to be his girlfriend for the week, an arrangement to which she happily agrees.

So begins a whirlwind of a love story, or something like it, as Ivan lavishes Ami with gifts, takes her out clubbing, and flies her and a gang of friends to Las Vegas on a private jet. It’s there that Ivan, horned up and smitten in that particularly adolescent way, proposes marriage. There’s a quickie chapel wedding, and Ani figures she’s hit the jackpot. But those rich parents back in Russia make us worry. When will the likely villains come to spoil the fairy tale?

Blessedly, Baker isn’t terribly interested in violence. When some of the body men in the family’s employ do come to intervene—their intention is to force an annulment—Ani is certainly manhandled, but it never seems that anyone’s well-being is in any serious danger. Instead, Baker sets this ragtag crew on a tear through Brighton Beach and Coney Island, another of Baker’s surveys of an interesting corner of the country. Ani is fuming, a taciturn goon named Igor (Yura Borisov) is making eyes at her, and Ivan is missing.

Throughout, Ani is repeatedly referred to, quite derisively, as “some hooker” or worse, epithets to which she takes righteous offense. Anora is largely about a woman in a marginalized profession constantly asserting her personhood among people who view her as little more than a concept, or a prop. Madison, sporting a mostly credible Brooklyn accent, does a lot to aid in that assertion. Her performance is big and vivid, brash but charming. Even when Baker’s storytelling and dialogue gets repetitive (this is a 139-minute movie that could certainly be trimmed), Madison keeps things lively.

In the courtship portion of the film, she and Eydelshteyn—who has an appealingly erratic beanpole energy—create a propulsive chemistry. Baker has once again given great, star-making roles to two worthy actors who’ve not had this kind of opportunity before. There is also a palpable charge passing between Ani and Igor, so winningly played by Borisov. Baker is careful to remind the audience that these two first met in a moment of aggression; Igor is not exactly gentle. But that doesn’t necessarily preclude later affection, just as it didn’t for Jack Foley and Karen Sisco in Out of Sight.

Still, a darkness thrums under the surface of all this flirting and bickering. Ani is forever yanked this way and that, degraded and disregarded. She is vocally indignant but otherwise rolls with it, baited with money and, no doubt, cowed by the tacit authority of those with it. There’s something political being said here, especially in the film’s final, disquieting scene. Immediately afterwards, I found myself torn between finding Baker’s conclusions compassionate and sensing a vague whiff of something patronizing. The film’s insistence that Ani, and maybe all sex workers, be given their autonomy and dignity is certainly a worthy mission. But is that assurance really this movie’s to give? And does the film’s use of sex in its final moments suggest a bit of armchair psychology about why sex workers do what they do? One could read Anora as a film that dares to think it can confer approval.

That is the risky line Baker’s explorations of outsiders—several of them, like Tangerine, concerning sex work—tend to tread, between graciousness and gawking, benevolent anthropology and the more malevolent, missionary kind. The more I think about Anora, the more I feel that it is operating from a good place, that its ultimate statement is one of complex empathy. That these faint alarm bells rang as I watched this vastly entertaining and finely acted film may simply be evidence of a contemporary kneejerk tendency to morally audit films, an impulse that Baker regularly, and perhaps admirably, challenges. Anora, like Ani, is maybe best understood on its own terms.