Peacock’s Disappointing Stormy Daniels Documentary

Back in 2018, a predictable right-leaning narrative emerged around Stephanie “Stormy Daniels” Clifford. Daniels — referred to with dripping contempt as a “porn star” — was an opportunist telling lies about Saint Donald of Trump. In the name of professional advancement and personal brand-building, she fabricated an affair (she claimed only one sexual interaction) and accepted payoffs (well, one payoff). From the outside, Daniels looked like she was having a blast, parrying with trolls on social media, dropping by Saturday Night Live and going on a stripping tour titled “Make America Horny Again.”

Nobody was really under the impression that her time in the spotlight helped us get to know the “real” Stormy Daniels, and most folks didn’t especially care. 

Any sense that Daniels’ ongoing kerfuffle with the 45th President of the United States has been a net positive for her life is put to rest in Sarah Gibson’s new documentary Stormy, premiering at SXSW ahead of a March 18 launch on Peacock. Daniels’ reflections on how her new fame crushed her marriage, tied her to a spotlight-seeking fraudster, led to death threats and, after a brief spark of attention, made her largely unemployable, give Stormy a poignant throughline. Miscast as a political crusader, she was just a woman who wanted to own her truth and paid an unfair price. It’s a sad and powerful story.

Unfortunately, the exhaustive repetition of the most familiar parts of her narrative — plus an over-reliance on poorly utilized footage from an ethically compromised earlier documentary project — left me more irritated than moved by Stormy, however persuasive I found its main character.

With an admirable lack of salaciousness, Gibson traces Daniels’ personal biography from a rough upbringing in Baton Rouge to her early forays into exotic dancing and her successful career in the adult industry. 

She recounts her first meetings with Trump, as well as their lone sexual encounter — she has always maintained that she didn’t want to have sex with him, but that she didn’t say “No” — with dashes of humor, but mostly the matter-of-fact tone of somebody who has spent a decade repeating the story and wishes she didn’t have to do it anymore. Gibson makes her do it twice, accompanied by the same lackluster, completely chaste, reenactments of hotel doors closing and whatnot.

The month-by-month trip through 2018 is thorough to the point of monotony. Daniels was a constant presence in the news at that point, giving regular interviews — she is shown backstage at The View and watching herself on 60 Minutes to reinforce the ouroboros of the media cycle — and engaging on social media. It isn’t wholly been-there-done-that because there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes footage from her various hotel rooms and tour buses. That footage is occasionally revelatory, but it produces what for me was an insurmountable ethical issue.

See, in 2018, Stormy Daniels was being followed by a journalist for another documentary. He had impressive access. Remarkable access. They were also, it turns out, having a brief affair, something that Gibson covers with exactly one line of text. 

This is an unconscionable breach of documentary and journalistic protocol. Maybe if the timeline were clearer, it would be possible to watch scenes of Daniels and husband Brendon Miller hashing out the end of their marriage without being bothered by the fact that a frequently on-camera filmmaker was later cited as a cause of the divorce. The timeline isn’t made clear, and Daniels’ already uncomfortable emotional vulnerability being expressed to somebody who violated every aspect of an intimate trust never feels close to kosher. Seriously, “Don’t sleep with your documentary subjects” is pretty basic stuff. That may be why the first documentary was never completed, but that’s never addressed. 

Granted, the earlier filmmaker’s ethical breach isn’t Gibson’s ethical breach. But her complete failure to grapple with the source of her key footage — it’s never totally clear what came from that original documentary and what came from other sources — isn’t far off. It’s somewhere between negligent — yes, it’s good that Gibson acknowledged the improper relationship rather than ignoring it completely — and simply bad filmmaking, given that Daniels’ complicated relationships with many of the men in her life, from Trump to Michael Avenatti and beyond, is germane to the text of the documentary. However you interpret it, it casts a pall over the whole film. Heck, the picture accompanying this review is credited to that first filmmaker.

And it isn’t like Stormy is some notable piece of craftsmanship otherwise. It’s visually bland, flaccidly edited at 110 minutes, and neither the first project’s filmmaker nor Gibson give any sense of having pushed Daniels beyond her pre-considered answers.

This is why the last 20 or 30 minutes — very rushed and abruptly concluded — with Daniels facing the ramifications of her truth-telling, are vastly more interesting and candid than anything she said in 2018. As she addresses the escalating rhetoric she’s faced on social media, the circumstances of her divorce (and her more recent fourth marriage), the state of her career and her finances, and the impact of this whole thing on her daughter, what you see is a very human woman perhaps for the first time confronting the consequences of the spotlight (albeit on-camera). 

The fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree footage from the first film could have been cut in half (or eliminated entirely) and this documentary could have been centered around Stormy Daniels today, and it would have been a better and more truthful movie. It wasn’t and it isn’t.