“Daddio” or Cabbing with Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson

Brandon Judell
4 min readAug 4, 2024

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There are few cinema offerings nowadays I can personally hold forth on the veracity of. No chasing of tornados (Twisters), no imaginary friends (If), and no mortgaging of my home to finance a flop (Horizon) really ring a bell in my life. Daddio, an ode to grizzled cabbies and their perplexed passengers, is the exception.

Having last month cabbed from the Upper West Side to JFK and two weeks later from Convent Garden to Heathrow, I know what it is to be rubbernecked in traffic and chewing the fat for close two hours with drivers who admired my earliness in waving them down. No need to rush.

Yes, my Lisbon Air flight was in five hours. My American Airlines back home in four.

The two gents — one from Senegal, the other a young Brit, wed with a second child on the way — knew I would not tense up and start hollering obscenities as their motors slumbered due to the onslaught of stymied hybrids. Yes, our progress could often be measured in inches or centimeters.

Clark admits almost proudly, “I drive around in this beast the whole day.” © SONY Pictures Classics

Now Christy Hall, who here directs Daddio from her stage play-cum-screenplay, has captured the . . . uh-hum . . . magic of two strangers, one sitting behind the other, connecting and possibly reconstructing each other’s outlooks on life even with the awareness they will never see each other ever again. And maybe just because of that.

Dakota Johnson is “Girlie,” a highly intelligent, sexually active, wounded romantic whose much older lover is married with children. When not putting his kids to sleep, her chap has a propensity for sending dick pics to her and asking her to photograph her private parts for him, even while she’s in a cab. This is the man she’s told, “I love you.” Oh, no!

Well, some background: Girlie, which is not her real moniker, has just arrived from visiting her sister in Oklahoma, and the taxi to midtown Manhattan she’s climbed into is driven by Clark (Sean Penn). She’s his last fare of the day.

Clark (Sean Penn) warns Girlie (Dakota Johnson) about her married lover: “He’s not going to be there when your olive oil dries up, sweetheart.” © SONY Pictures Classics

Clark, as inhabited by Mr. Penn, is reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart at his gruffiest: macho with an initially unsavory but eventually addictive charm. There is a lamb hidden within this foul-mouthed lone wolf.

Cabbing for twenty years, his wife whom Clark loved deeply in the not most respectful of ways is now deceased. As for his main talent, other than surviving mentally unscathed from Big-Apple traffic jams, is being a front-seat Freud for those unravelling, jet-lagged travelers who’ve hunkered down for what they thought was going to be a quiet ride home.

Let the banter begin: “Have you ever been a pig in the bedroom?” Clark asks.

Now if I were a young woman, even in my 30s or 40s, after a few verbal back-and-forths with this gent, I would have yelled, “Stop!” thrust open the door and ran for my life. To hell with my luggage! If not then, when Clark takes out a bottle and is ready to piss in front of me, that might have been the moment.

But Girlie’s no pushover: “I honestly hate you right now. You are everything that’s wrong with the world.”

“I like to push buttons,” Clark admits, adding he’s one of those awful men who can’t be trusted when it comes to women. In fact, no guy is actually trustworthy, he professes.

“There are good men out there,” Girlie retorts, but she also notes when she refuses to reveal her age, that “the moment [women] hit thirty our value is cut in half.”

The battle of the sexes here, which is actually less a battle and more like a raunchy therapy group, continues with more than several moving revelations along the way.

But with a 100-minute running time, the idea of being stuck on a highway with just two folks in a taxi combatting over sexual inequities and out-of-reach desires might not seem that inviting to some. Think again. With two superb performances by the leads, Hall’s sharp dialogue, plus award-worthy cinematography by Phedon Papamichael and editing by Lisa Zeno Churgin, Daddio is one cab ride you won’t mind leaving a 20 percent tip for.

(Daddio is now available to buy or rent at such sites as AppleTV, Spectrum, Amazon, and Microsoft.)

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Brandon Judell

For half a century, Brandon Judell has covered the LGBTQI scene and the arts. He currently lectures at The City College of New York.