The eponymous character of Anora, a feisty 23-year-old Brooklyn sex worker, lives the sort of hardscrabble and precarious life that writer-director Sean Baker has vigorously tracked across his work. But while Baker’s protagonists are typically mired in the same place, Ani (Mikey Madison), as Anora emphatically prefers to be called, manages to escape the familiar, and crash through the class divide with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Her quixotic quest to remain among Russian oligarchs is a riotously funny neorealist farce that will be familiar to fans of Tangerine and Red Rocket, though at times it feels like the rougher edges of Baker’s vision have been smoothed out in the interest of driving home an easily digestible allegory.

We meet Ani inside the strip club where she works as a dancer, an environment that she manages an impressive level of control over. She easily seduces the...