Steve Zahn’s Tender Screenwriting Debut Suffers From Conventionality

Steve Zahn has made a career for himself by frequently playing the lovable oaf. It was true in Saving Silverman, and it was true in the first season of The White Lotus. Mileage varies, but through the latter, Zahn proved he also contained a remarkable emotional depth. With She Dances, he makes his screenwriting debut, giving himself and his real-life daughter, dancer Audrey Zahn, a chance to plumb those depths ever further. As Jason, he is both the goof and the heart.

Zahn’s acting chops aside, the film is sweet but far too tepid to land. Unfortunately, a large part of that problem is due to Audrey Zahn, whose acting debut is stiff and awkward, exhibiting none of the same qualities as her far more experienced father. Given that the crux of the film’s emotional arc is dependent on the severe, shared trauma the father and daughter have, many scenes are at a frustrating remove. She has a consistent issue selling a character that is supposed to be nearly estranged from her father; anytime the two are supposed to be tense with each other, she just comes across as generally unfeeling.

She Dances Stays At An Emotional Remove Until The Film’s Final Moments

In a way, that lack of emotional vulnerability works. Claire and Jason (Audrey and Steve, respectively) are both dealing with the loss of Jack (Henry Zahn), and neither of them has exactly found the best way to handle their respective grief. The implication seems to be that Jason and Claire’s mother, Deb (Rosemarie DeWitt), have separated since their son’s death, and that Jason was, or maybe still is, an alcoholic. He honors his late son by naming his whiskey distillery “Two Jacks” – which he co-owns with Brian (Ethan Hawke), whose son shares the name – but otherwise represses. Claire, no more emotionally available, pours her feelings into a competitive dance career.

The fractured relationship is put further to the test when a run of strange events forces Claire to ask her father to act as a guardian and chaperone to her and her friend, Kat (Mackenzie Ziegler), at the Young Miss Southeast Regional Dance Finals in Kentucky. Getting to this set-up is a bit clunky and overly expositional, but the whole film is so chummy and easy to watch that much of it washes down fairly smoothly.The road trip to Kentucky is odd, with a couple of requisite moments of put-upon road trip shenanigans. A lot of the film’s narrative turns feel overtly written in, as when the car almost immediately gets a flat tire and Jason insists that his daughter learn how to change it rather than call AAA. Later, at the hotel, Jason discovers that he screwed up the reservation date, and the trio is forced to shack up at a motel down the road called “Down the Road.” Most of these moments are brought up only to be quickly tossed aside.A lot is made of the fact that Jason and Claire haven’t spent much time together, and that they’ve even worked hard to avoid each other, but in the execution everything seems tepid at most. Broadly, director Rick Gomez gestures to Claire’s lack of ability to extend grace towards her grieving father and Jason’s lack of ability to simply show up, but in practice this doesn’t pan out. She Dances seems almost scared of its own premise.As the dance competition continues, Jason and Claire’s moderately icy relationship begins to thaw, thanks to an assist from the latter’s crunchy granola dance teacher, Jamie (Star Trek: Discovery‘s Sonequa Martin-Green), and an inevitable conversation where they both acknowledge their shared pain. She Dances doesn’t always work, but when it does, it is able to give voice to the power of artistic expression to cultivate catharsis. A lot of the dance sequences aren’t filmed with much innovation, but Gomez brings it home in the end with a lovely finale.Throughout the film, Gomez uses a split-screen technique to emphasize both the emotional distance between father and daughter and also highlight that these people, who have assumed they are diametrically opposite, are actually so close they could almost touch each other. And, ultimately, the film is able to hit those beats with tenderness and care. As generic as the title is, there’s a certain cogency to it, reflecting a young woman who moves the way others speak. For Jason, perhaps all he needs to do is listen.

She Dances opens in theaters on March 27, 2026.