The conceit of Daddio is that it’s just two people in a car driving from JFK Airport into New York City. It’s a yellow cab and the driver is played by Sean Penn, the passenger by Dakota Johnson.
As the car rolls towards the city they talk. At first Clark makes cab driver smalltalk, kneejerk remarks about the modern world and how everything has gone to the bad. Then he shifts on to giving her the wealth of his wisdom, and eventually, after a cool appraisal, she obviously comes to the conclusion that he’s mostly mouth and starts to respond.
This is what the film is about, their wide-ranging conversation, but returning regularly to gender politics, power dynamics in a relationship and how – this is his angle – men and women are aiming at different goals: men want sex, women want love, in a nutshell.
It’s not revolutionary as an agenda, all very plausible as a scenario, and Penn and Johnson make a feisty pair as they whack the lines back and forth like boxers in a ring.
The effect is like a cross between Locke, the 2013 movie by Steven Knight set inside a speeding BMW in which driver Tom Hardy made one increasingly desperate hands-free phone call after another, and Lost in Translation, in which jaded Bill Murray gave sweet Scarlett Johansson notes on living your life.
At one point I asked myself if I’d watch this if it was two unknowns on a bare stage – it’s a play, really – batting it to and fro. I don’t think I would. There’s not an awful lot to get hold of.
Which is to deny how good the performances of Johnson and Penn are. She was cast first and suggested him, a neighbour, for the role. It’s a very canny suggestion: Penn plays Clark as an amalgam of driver, father figure, confessor, therapist and chivalric knight. Writer/director Christy Hall has, thankfully, stayed away from toxic masculinity as a theme but Penn injects a touch of that too. Clark was clearly a tearaway as a young man, but age has mellowed him. Toxic masculinity is a usually young man’s game.
As for Johnson’s playing of the woman, billed tellingly as Girlie, she imbues her character with just the right amount of city sophistication and, as the revelations start to tumble one after the other, the inner smalltown girl she originally was also seems part and parcel of this self-possessed, feisty but also fragile woman too.
There’s a dick pic, at one point, from the older married man Girlie is seeing but probably shouldn’t be, and she also sends him a shot of her tits, to help him on his way towards an orgasm. It’s actually almost touching – probably the wrong word.
Apparently it should have been Daisy Ridley in this role. It’s easy to imagine her in it, and also to imagine her being good in it, but having seen Dakota Johnson, it now also seems like no one else could have done it – which is a flat contradiction, I know, but there you go.
Is Girlie flirting with Clark – who’d rather be called a more street-credible name, like Vinnie, he opines at one point? Maybe. Maybe she flirts with all men. As for him – and this is where Penn’s performance is particularly good – he veers into personal emotional space now and again, like a driver changing lanes without indicating, and the temperature goes up a notch. Then swings back again, as if Clark had perhaps caught himself going into territory he knows he shouldn’t have entered and pulled himself back. There’s a real “if I was ten years younger” aspect to Clark, which Penn catches brilliantly well.
It is a conceit, and at times it becomes too obvious that that’s what it is. The performances, though, give it life. Watch it for those and you will be rewarded.
Daddio – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
