Even with a well-meaning brother (Brad William Henke) and a seemingly decent dad (Sam Bottoms), Sherry, post-prison, is trapped alone in emotionally cauterizing layers of pathology, externally visualized by Newark, New Jersey, wasteland locations that look as though a nuke strike could only help.
Reduced by circumstance to a near-feral state, her only hope is in regaining her daughter Alexis (Ryan Simpkins). She screws anything that moves or looks like it might ward off self-awareness, dope hunger or get her the job she needs to reclaim Alexis. (The insult informing her hyper-sexuality is later visualized in one quick, awful image.) She finally earns custody of Alexis, but despite the help of her NA sponsor/occasional lover Dean (Danny Trejo), her hard work only leads her inexorably to dealing with her worst enemy: herself. Whatever the hell that might be.
Prior to Sherrybaby, Collyer made a documentary, Nuyorican Dream, about a New York Puerto Rican family wracked by poverty, crack and incarceration. Sherrybaby has a similar, artfully uninflected feel. Which is no small thing, warding off melodrama, hysteria and cheap manipulative impulses for 96 minutes. While Indiewood is filled with directors claiming to emulate '70s American cinema, all they usually come up with are fawning simulations of the period's stylistic quirks: the shaky-cams, zooms, grainy stock. Collyer updates the '70s aesthetic of a less mannered, looser cinema that places a premium on performance and raw-nerved immediacy, never getting mired in rote appropriations. What we get is a film that feels like its endless minor catastrophes are happening in real time.
Gyllenhaal matches her director in affect-free vérité. Walking with a permanent slouch, like she's bending under the weight of an awful personal gravity, her hair bleached straw blond, her eyes like dull nickels, this is a brave, screw-the-vanity turn. Her many nude sex scenes are either disturbing (Sherry enjoying a near-stranger performing oral sex on her as a cheap endorphin rush) or outright horrifying (realizing a social services person won't get her a job, she seduces him with all the passion of a Romero zombie).
Collyer and Gyllenhaal gamble big on crafting a heroine who's alternately manipulative or a complete bitch, but whose humanity and numbed basic decency finally trump her failings. The film ends with a certain hope, but one appropriate to the reality lensed here—tenuous, flitting and fragile.