The hip-pumping studs who work at the Xquisite dance club know a thing or two about making the ladies scream in delight. But nobody works the crowd like Magic Mike (a terrific Channing Tatum), the gyrating main attraction in Steven Soderbergh’s funny, enjoyable romp about male strippers and the American dream. Then again, few directors can sell the goods — whether it’s Che in Cuba or Mike in a thong — as shrewdly as Mr. Soderbergh. A restive talent who toggles between big-studio and low-budget work, he has a genius for wrapping tricky ideas, like capitalism and its discontents, into commercial packages. Never before has he put them into cheek-baring chaps.
Those cheeks, smooth as a hairless Chihuahua, will receive considerable attention, as will the rippling muscles, thrusting pelvises and the dancing, by turns snaky and acrobatic, that are on generous display in “Magic Mike.” Mr. Tatum, who shares producing credit (the movie was written by his production partner Reid Carolin), has said that the story is loosely based on his stint as a stripper in Florida, starting when he was 18, a college dropout and flopping on his sister’s couch. The dropout here is Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who’s crashing with his sister, Brooke (Cody Horn), while trying to get his life together. He receives unexpected help when he takes a job at a construction site, where he meets an older, regular employee, Mike, who’s initially contemptuous of the newcomer.
But Mike has a heart of gold, which becomes evident as soon as he takes Adam under his wing, first at the construction site and then by bringing the younger man to Xquisite. Initially incredulous and unsettled at some of what he sees at the club, Adam changes his mind after he’s pushed onstage and, to the blunt throbbing of “Like a Virgin,” strips. He takes to the stage like an otter to water, slipping and sliding across it and into the lap of an obliging customer. When he comes offstage, a smile on his face and his saggy Jockeys stuffed with bills, he is a man reborn. It’s no wonder that, after this memorably frolicking night, Adam asks if he can be Mike’s best friend.
What happens will be familiar if you’ve ever seen one of those variations on the fallen-woman movie. An elastic genre popular in the 1920s and ’30s, these flicks usually involve a working-class young miss who comically scrambles or crudely tramps her way into a mink, swank digs and finally either tragedy or redemption, depending on whether she’s doomed or saved. Sometimes she also initiates an innocent into her life pretty much the same way Mike brings Adam into his world of sexual play, casual drug use and dance music. In the past the movies were very much preoccupied with the moral regulation of women, but here the stress is on Mike’s struggle to succeed as he juggles his part-time gigs (dancing, auto detailing and construction) with his desire to build custom furniture.
For the most part this isn’t a party scene built for doom, especially when Mike is dancing, bouncing and back-flipping. Set in Tampa (but also shot in California), a palm-lined wasteland that Mr. Soderbergh has washed in somewhat queasy-ugly bleached orange, the movie opens at the club with the owner-M.C., Dallas (a spectacular, amusingly sleazed-out Matthew McConaughey), running down the rules for the female clientele. “This is the ‘What can you touch and not touch’ rule,” Dallas says, the room erupting in appreciative woos. As he ticks off what customers can and can’t grope, his hands grab and graze different parts of his body, and then he wags a finger and repeatedly says “no.” “The law says that you cannot touch,” he continues. “But I think I see a lot of lawbreakers up in this house tonight.”
The legal dos and don’ts suggest that the law of the father has been partly overthrown, even if the naughtiness remains hidden, away from the glare of the outside world. The club is something of a playground, a place where women and men teasingly, raucously switch traditional roles. Yet there’s a serious undertow to their interactions because the women pay men for a sexual pantomime that the men live off of. (The plot also involves Dallas’s plans to open a bigger club in which he’s promised Mike equity, a pledge that keeps Mike dancing and distracted from his own dreams.) From the way that Mr. Soderbergh shoots the opener, the lights shining into the camera and your eyes (you may flash on “All That Jazz”), it’s clear everyone is playing a role, including you.
In “Magic Mike,” men exist to be looked at, and women do the looking, a reverse of the old cinematic divide between the sexes that finds so-called passive women who are looked at by so-called active men. In one school of thought Hollywood movies are always organized for the visual pleasure of the male spectator, which pretty much leaves the female spectator sidelined. There’s no leaving her out any longer — or the gay or confident heterosexual male spectator, either. From the way Mr. Soderbergh shoots the raunchy, often hilarious vamping dance scenes (Village People Plus), his camera lingering on the undulating bodies — the other strippers are played by Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Adam Rodriguez and Kevin Nash — it’s clear the director is out to maximize everyone’s pleasure.
Much like Mr. Soderbergh’s movie, “Haywire,” starring Gina Carano, the mixed-martial-arts champ, “Magic Mike” is very much about the beauty of bodies in motion and the deep cinematic joys of watching good-looking people perform extraordinary physical feats. Since parting professional ways with George Clooney, whom Mr. Soderbergh helped transform into a star, the director has pinned some of his more severe projects to nonintuitive attractions like Ms. Carano and Sasha Grey, a former porn actress. He may have been bored with big stars, though that’s doubtful (there are a few headliners in “Haywire” and a boatload in “Contagion”). It may have been a matter of money, or he may have wanted to see what he could accomplish with non-Hollywood performers.
The hard-working Mr. Tatum is scarcely non-Hollywood. In his carefully strategized career he has gone quickly from music-video anonymity and background brooding to serving as a co-star and now lead in bigger and bigger mainstream fare. (There’s also been the de rigueur host gig on “Saturday Night Live.”) He’s pretty, if not impossibly so, with the looks of the heartthrob next door and the wrestler’s neck, jug-handle ears and smiles that help bring him down to earth. Unlike, say, Matt Damon, though, Mr. Tatum hasn’t yet played smart on screen. He conveys earnestness to the point of goofiness, an air of unworldliness bordering on unintelligence that was comically exploited in the buddy comedy “21 Jump Street.” He doesn’t seem like an obvious fit with Mr. Soderbergh.
“Magic Mike” sounds like a Soderberghian experiment and maybe it is, though not on a conspicuous level. Save for a luridly colored bacchanal, an entertaining attempt at drug-fueled, sex-spiked Expressionism, the movie has little of the formal experimentation that sometimes characterizes Mr. Soderbergh’s feature-film work. Yet the collaboration between Mr. Soderbergh and the relatively untested Mr. Tatum is itself a gamble, one that has brought out the best in each. What could have been an embarrassing misfire hinted at by the movie’s misleading trailers is instead a smoothly distilled collaboration that balances Mr. Tatum’s heat and charm — and ambitions that are as transparent as Mike’s — with Mr. Soderbergh’s cool, cinematic intelligence and ongoing preoccupations.
Like some of Mr. Soderbergh’s other movies, including “The Girlfriend Experience,” about a New York prostitute,“Magic Mike” is also very much an inquiry into capitalism and its woes, which means that, like them, it’s also about movies. At one point Mike puts on a suit and glasses and tries to secure a bank loan. Mr. Soderbergh plays up the comedy between the stripper and flustered female banker (Betsy Brandt), who says she really, really wants to give him what he wants but can’t. Mike yearns to make his artisan furniture. The world, though, wants him to strip and shake his tail. That may not be the subtlest metaphor for the independent filmmaker struggling against the Hollywood machine, but like the rest of this movie, it works — beautifully.
“Magic Mike” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Drugs, partial nudity.