Nothing Upstages A Good Dakota Johnson Movie Like A Bad Dakota Johnson Movie (That Most People Would Rather Watch)

Dakota Johnson‘s new movie hits streaming today, and it’s not a summer blockbuster: It’s a two-hander called Daddio that takes place almost entirely within the confines of a New York City taxi cab. Sean Penn plays the driver, Johnson plays the passenger, and their traffic-delayed drive from JFK International Airport to midtown Manhattan is the entire 101-minute running time. (Sadly, this is not an especially unbelievable door-to-door clock for the 25-mile journey.) The movie depends almost entirely on Johnson and Penn – it’s essentially one long, winding conversation between the two of them – and has received strong reviews out of various festivals. It’s also unlikely to be the most-watched Dakota Johnson movie of the month.

That title, as ever, will likely go to Fifty Shades of Grey, the first installment in the sex-drama trilogy that still represents the actress’s biggest commercial success. The whole trilogy is on Netflix at the moment, and the first film has spent a good chunk of the month in the Netflix Top 10. It’s not Johnson’s only Netflix hit of 2024, either; Madame Web remains on the service following its theatrical flop back in February, and though the viewing numbers are often opaque, it’s entirely possible more that more people watched Web than went to see Daddio during its short theatrical run (during which time the movie grossed less than $1MM worldwide). The same could go for the well-reviewed Am I OK? which hit Max to little fanfare in June. Nothing upstages a good Dakota Johnson movie like a bad Dakota Johnson movie that many people would much rather watch.

Of course, most people who are aware of Johnson are likely familiar with her from the Fifty Shades movies. She had bit parts in other big movies, befitting her status as the Hollywood-royalty daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson (and, therefore, granddaughter of Tippi Hedren), but Fifty Shades gave her a famous character in the form of Anastasia Steele, the meek college girl swept into a submissive relationship to rich weirdo Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). It’s especially notable because of how rare it is for a star to appear visibly embarrassed by their own big moment. The closest equivalent might be Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart doing time in the Twilight series, which often concealed just how good both actors could be. At the same time, Pattinson and Stewart performed their scenes with the requisite earnestness. Arguably the best thing about the Fifty Shades movies, apart from the fact that Christian Grey canonically has a Chronicles of Riddick poster on his childhood bedroom wall, is the way Johnson seems only half-committed to the part, stopping just short of rolling her eyes at the movie’s ridiculousness. It’s why the negotiation scene in the first movie is one of the only sequences that really works; it plays up the wryness that Johnson seems to wish she could deploy the whole time.

The Fifty Shades movies are bad material, taken (mostly) seriously; at the same time, Johnson is a nepo baby who seems actively annoyed by some of her biggest movies. This is precisely how Johnson is able to appear likable and even relatable while also maintaining the aura of brattiness that an inescapable part of her persona. To her credit, Johnson leans into this when exercising her generally interesting taste in smaller movies like A Bigger Splash, The Lost Daughter, and Cha Cha Real Smooth, where her characters have a kind of sympathetic disaffection that you might find in a Sofia Coppola movie.

That’s approximately where Daddio lands, though it’s not as nuanced or thought-provoking as Johnson’s best indie work. Johnson plays an unnamed woman whose weariness can be, typically for a Johnson character, boiled down to “over it.” She doesn’t seem like the type of person who wants to make small talk with a cabbie, but – in a necessary if not especially plausible conceit – Clark (Sean Penn) quickly wears down her resistance, and soon the two are chatting about themselves, at times getting surprisingly personal, as well as occasionally combative. Written and directed by Christy Hall, Daddio is basically a two-hander that marinates on ideas about love and relationships; Clark eventually coaxes out some information about a fraught relationship we glimpse only via the woman’s texts, and both performers strip away background chit-chat to touch some emotional rawness. To say much more about their conversation would count as a spoiler; the dialogue really is the story here, even without especially shocking revelations.

Johnson and Penn are both good in Daddio, and Hall’s compositions, using the natural framing of cab’s rearview mirror and two-shot-friendly clear partition between driver and passenger, are a reminder that close quarters don’t have to feel cramped or stagy. Yet the movie also drives home the degree to which Johnson’s smaller movies often rely on her bigger ones for context. It’s easy to see how her meta vexation in Fifty Shades of Grey complements the ennui she cultivates in movies like The Lost Daughter or A Bigger Splash, especially when glimmers of desire – something she does have to fake in Fifty Shades, however unevenly – shine through her disaffection. Despite some flashes of sexual explicitness, Daddio feels more like an addendum to Johnson’s not-quite-rom-com How to Be Single; it’s easy to imagine her character in that movie jumping into Clark’s cab and having a 90-minute deleted-scene heart-to-heart. That a movie as negligible as How to Be Single is the reference point here should convey how Daddio is perhaps more successful as an element of Johnson’s persona than as its own living, breathing movie.

Making a movie that engages with a star’s persona isn’t a crime – but, like Johnson’s persona in general, in this case it may over-rely on an assumption of chumminess with her nepo-baby moodiness. To be fair and to her credit, Johnson obviously gravitates toward movies about relationships, rather than big, splashy action; that’s why Madame Web was most compelling as a vehicle for a prickly, socially awkward woman becoming the reluctant guardian to a trio of prospective superheroes, rather than a rich, Spider-Man-related mythology. At the same time, there’s something potentially disingenuous about projecting a kind of deadpan insouciance about big paycheck jobs she doesn’t seem to want or need. Of course, Johnson’s willingness to play ball with Sony (to a point, anyway) got Daddio, the project she cares more about, its distribution, just as Fifty Shades afforded her to make the indies that presumably better reflect her taste (and just as Pattinson and Stewart leveraged Twilight into a pair of stunningly strong filmographies). Is that enough juice, though, to enliven the spectacle of Johnson sitting in a cab, calling Sean Penn “man” a bunch of times, and occasionally tearing up over a thinly imagined bad-dad backstory, for 100 minutes? Johnson’s best performances tend to work as counterpoints to other major characters; she’s a consummate second lead, but she needs more than a locked-in Sean Penn to create a fuller character. It can be fun to see Johnson affect a fashionable remove from some of her sillier movies; it may also be time for her to figure out where she stands without them.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.