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We're all Team Pamela now; how could we not be? Pamela Anderson's story, with its sunny, sexy, dream-come-true beginning and its darkening, porn-come-true trajectory, could have been anybody's bumpy trip.

It hasn't all been awful, of course. Anderson was a little Canadian kid who came to the States, blossomed into a hot number in Playboy magazine, morphed into a worldwide TV star on "Baywatch," made movies (the first "Borat" film, the trashy action flick "Barb Wire"), starred on Broadway (in a "Chicago" revival), worked as a magazine columnist, wrote a cookbook, did a bunch of music videos, published an autobiography, campaigned against whale hunting, stepped blithely into the Bulgarian version of "Big Brother," and ... let's see ... teamed up with an American rabbi to give an anti-porn address at the University of Oxford.

Anderson also hasn't been reticent in discussing her tabloid life: There are the five troublesome husbands (among them musicians Tommy Lee and Kid Rock, and pro poker player Rick Salomon, Paris Hilton's onetime sex-tape videographer); her own two massively annoying sex-tape scandals -- one featuring husband-at-the-time Tommy Lee, the other Bret Michaels, of the band Poison; the famous punch-out at the 2007 Video Music Awards between Rock and Lee; and the ongoing chronicle of Anderson's famous breasts (or breast implants, now departed). "My boobs had a career and I was just tagging along," she once said.

She candidly covered a lot of this territory in her 2023 bio-documentary, "Pamela: A Love Story." Now, with her TV and cinematic bona fides long- and well-established, she and director Gia Coppola and writer Kate Gersten examine an adjacent realm of female exploitation (including self-exploitation) in a new movie, "The Last Showgirl," which attempts to work up an air of showbiz tragedy from the well-known but un-tragic details of the fiercely enterprising Anderson's real life.

That this doesn't work is not entirely Anderson's fault. As a Las Vegas showgirl named Shelly, she does project the bedeviling insecurity of a woman whose looks are her living -- and whose looks are fading. What's most affecting about the performance is Anderson's physical transformation: She has said that she's stopped using makeup in everyday life, and here her face - presumably adjusted with the pats of powder necessary to prevent skin shine under studio lights -- has what would most accurately be called a fresh glow, even when her character is dripping with rhinestones or helmeted with bushy pom-poms the size of carryon luggage. Only her eyebrows -- so thin they might have been drawn onto her face with a freshly sharpened #2 pencil -- suggest an older, more noirish world.

The story is a checklist of cliches about female oppression. Shelly and her fellow workers at the casino show "Le Razzle Dazzle" -- among them Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka and Jamie Lee Curtis (in a raw performance as a former showgirl who aged out of the job and now works as a cocktail waitress in the casino itself) -- give no thought to their future until the club manager, Eddie (Dave Bautista), who reveres the place, sadly tells them that new casino owners have decided to close their show in two weeks. Only Shelly, the oldest of the group, seems seriously panicked -- she still sees the club as the fulfillment of her childhood dream of becoming a legitimate dancer. She appears to have no inkling of what the job market might be like for a middle-aged woman in her field. This seems most unlikely, and suggests a mental deficiency.

Complicating all of this is a young woman named Hannah (Billie Lourd), who turns out to be Shelly's barely acknowledged daughter, and who bears with her further feminist issues, some of them virtually eternal.

If the filmmakers had been interested in opening up their story with humor, or even just wryly perceptive dialogue, they might have been better able to illuminate their subject -- the status of women in performing arts -- which is certainly worthy of examination. In any case, they've positioned Pamela Anderson for one more shot at a serious career -- something worth rooting for.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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