‘Daddio’: Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn Are Trapped in a Taxi Going Nowhere

Movies taking place in cars are part of a subgenre of single-set filmmaking that’s tricky to find, but usually pretty good. Steven Spielberg cut his teeth on Duel, in which a traveling salesman is chased by the homicidal driver of a semi truck. Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock have to keep a bus careening down a Los Angeles highway in Speed. Tom Hardy takes the most riveting phone calls about pouring concrete you’ve ever seen while driving from Birmingham to London in Locke. The latest entry into this genre, Christy Hall’s taxi-set directorial debut Daddio, stars Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn, and the Manhattan skyline in a slice-of-life drama about what two strangers could possibly talk about on a 90-minute car ride.

A young woman (Johnson), clad in platform Docs, a bucket bag, and a platinum-blonde bob, exits JFK Airport late at night and (apparently skipping the loud, long taxi line) hops into a waiting cab driven by a man who later introduces himself as Clark (Penn). Clark is a talker but not incessant, asking the woman (known only as Girlie) where she’s flying from and what she does for work. It’s late, but Girlie is game for the conversation. She responds with a mischievous glint in her eye to even Clark’s more probing questions about her past and her job and her love life, a welcome distraction from the boyfriend who keeps sending her vulgar and ridiculous sexts. Their conversation becomes a game as they trade bits of their past and their memories like poker chips.

As far as what “happens,” that’s it. The movie proceeds, more or less in real time, as the cab drives the route from JFK to Midtown Manhattan, only stopping toward the middle when Clark runs up against a traffic jam. It’s a fun idea, but the spareness means the whole film basically rests on the performances of a pair of actors and the dialogue they’re handed. I can understand the appeal of scripts like this to actors like Johnson and Penn—one still attempting to free herself from the successful yet derided franchise that made her a star, the other later in his career and searching for meatier character work. No one has to worry about costume changes or traveling to locations or expensive special effects.

The problem, though, is that the screenplay, which was written by Hall (creator of Netflix’s fantastic I Am Not Okay with This) and ranked highly on the 2017 Black List, is disappointingly generic. One of the first things Clark tells Girlie is that he appreciates that she doesn’t have her face in her phone (as all young people these days do, eye roll) before launching into a diatribe about credit cards and apps and tipping culture. She eventually tells him that she works as a computer programmer (a girl coder, can you believe it?), and he commends her for holding her own in a male-dominated work environment. All of Clark’s compliments have that negging vibe that older men reserve for younger women, and Girlie falls into the trap, determined to prove she’s not offended, not like those other girls.

The movie seems sort of aware of these thorny little nuances, but it's more interested in keeping things plotless and slice-of-life. Clark is never outright creepy, instead serving as a sort of totem of gruff elder masculinity, full of factoids about the differences between men and women. “Men love women who are dumb as shit,” he says, while describing his first wife. Girlie’s busy-fingered boyfriend is constantly describing sexual acts and demanding dirty pictures over the phone, and she either ignores him or begrudgingly plays along. It’s all very gendered, not in an aggressive or offensive way, but in a way that would perhaps feel more at home in 2017 than it does in 2024.

Johnson and Penn are very good as a pair, mainly because they’re both good actors, and not because the movie gives them much to work with. Penn’s Clark is abrasive yet more or less safe, the kind of cab driver anyone could imagine themselves striking up a conversation with at the end of a trip, provided they’re in the mood. Johnson plays Girlie with that peculiar edge she’s been honing since she was freed from Fifty Shades, her eyes always glinting with either malice or laughter, or both. Theirs is a matchup that would make a great script into a fantastic movie, but instead they’re working hard to turn it into an OK one. They’re good enough that Daddio isn’t actively terrible. It isn’t any better or worse than dozing off in the back of a cab, but only one of those will leave you feeling refreshed.