One could argue that we are currently living through a golden age of unnecessary sequels. It seems that there’s a constant effort to revive and reinvigorate IP of varying degrees of dustiness; why make something new if you can make something familiar that people have already told you that they like?

Of course, that leaves us in a world where we’re surrounded by not just the ongoing blockbuster franchises that are the box office’s foundation, but also movies that continue stories that audiences believed had reached their conclusion (note: for the most part, audiences were fine with that).

And so we get something like “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” the third installment in the adventures of Channing Tatum’s charming and unlucky male stripper. Did we need another “Magic Mike”? Almost certainly not – especially nearly a decade after 2015’s better-than-it-needed-to-be sequel “Magic Mike XXL.” But hey – Steven Soderbergh came back (he directed the first film) and he’s always had a sort of quasi-muse thing happening with Tatum. Maybe it’d work?

Reader, it did not.

Look, the choreography is great – it’s always great in these movies – but that isn’t enough to carry the day. Particularly when you’re dealing with a confusing and occasionally bordering on nonsensical narrative. Soderbergh knows how to make this stuff look good – and there are stretches when this movie looks phenomenal – but when the story unravels upon even a cursory examination, it isn’t enough, despite the efforts of the director and his stars.

You can turn just about anything into a movie.

Books and plays, sure. But also songs and TV shows and comic books. Cartoons and toys. Folk tales and urban legends. All of these things have been given the cinematic treatment over the years. Adaptation to the screen is a huge part of the movie business.

But can a Twitter thread become a movie? It can if it achieves enough viral notoriety that it becomes known as simply #TheStory.

That’s what we get with “Zola,” a film inspired by a legendary 148-tweet thread posted in 2015 by a Detroit waitress and exotic dancer named A’Ziah “Zola” King and the David Kushner story for Rolling Stone that followed. Adapted to the screen by Jeremy O. Harris and Janicza Bravo, who also directed the film, it’s a surreal and darkly comic road trip to the heart of American darkness. You know – Florida.

It is a bleak and hilarious story, one whose based-in-reality bona fides strain credulity – in a good way. There’s an intensity to the tale, charged as it is with various flavors of cultural and societal mores being prodded, bent and broken. Again, we’re talking about a film – a story – that is inherently and utterly bizarre, yet wildly compelling, a fascinating glimpse of a world many of us have never experienced for ourselves.