Drag queens are never more striking than when they’re set against an everyday background. “Kristen Stewart is a buoy … ” the Laotian American beauty Jujubee muttered spacily to herself in the hallway of Bleecker Street Media’s New York office, reading out the tag-line of a framed poster for the 2024 sci-fi/romance Love Me. The former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant and star of the new disaster-comedy Stop! That! Train! was lingering outside an office cubicle in a structured blazer and fishnets as an attentive PR took her order for lunch. By that point she’d been in full wardrobe and make-up all day fielding press, including a mid-morning stop with her castmates at NBC’s Today with Jenna & Sheinelle.
I’d heard Jujubee and her co-star Ginger Minj before I saw them, laughing like glamorous hyenas from another room. When they made an entrance, they did so in coordinated cheetah print looks, greeting me with the kind of mega-watt smiles that told me I was now their audience. I was impressed by how “on” they were, but could imagine it was taxing to keep up. How had the whirlwind of press been for them? “It’s been a lot of work but it doesn’t feel like it,” Ginger admitted. “The tour has absolutely mimicked the making of the movie.” “We have to schedule our sleep,” Jujubee added as she slowly began to peel off some cumbersome press-on nails. “But I’m so high on life and all of us have been able to stay in the moment, and live in this stormaganza of press.” They immediately started cackling again.
Stop! That! Train! is set in a parallel America where railways are the dominant mode of transportation, “stormaganzas” are recognized (if infrequent) extreme weather events, and seemingly everyone is an amoral maniac dedicated to acting out on their worst behavior. Even if you don’t believe that the premise of “RuPaul as president of the United States” should be played for laughs, the drag queen-fronted comedy by Adam Shankman develops such an infectious, full-throated strain of humor that it’s very hard not to succumb to its charm. The movie works in the same tradition of satire as The Naked Gun, Scary Movie, and Airplane!, where conventional logic matters less than sustained world-building and rapid-fire joke-telling. It’s a format that lends itself uniquely well to RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality show that dedicates whole episodes to extended parody and where glamour and spoof coexist together on the cellular level.
The film follows Tess (Ginger) and DeeDee (Jujubee) who become stewardesses on luxury train line, Glamazonian, after they’re suddenly laid off from Stank Rail. Natural disaster, presidential politics, musical numbers, paranormal activity and Sarah Michelle Gellar ensue. The screenplay by Christina Friel and Connor Wright is incredibly busy, clocking an astonishing rate of gags per minute that only becomes fully clear after multiple watches. Even if not all of the punchlines land, the constantly zipping dialogue means that you don’t have to wait long until the next massive one-liner. The extended gag of legendary queen Latrice Royale taking on every job in America, the call-and-response hilarity of “give it to me straight/now give it to me gay” and the blink-or-miss-it randomness of Raven-Symoné playing a character called “Shayna Gefilte-Manischewitz” are woven together like comic kevlar.
Despite how mainstream and award-winning Drag Race is, and how well-received auxiliary shows like AJ and the Queen and We’re Here have been, Stop! That! Train! still feels like a major crossover event for the franchise. It is a vehicle that’s pointedly aimed at a much wider public rather than their established cult audience. “I was very clear with [the producers] that I was making a movie for everyone, not just Drag Race fans,” Shankman clarified. “This movie doesn’t exist without Drag Race but you could say that about the off-shoots of characters from Saturday Night Live: they’re their own thing, and we’re our own thing.”
After guest judging on Drag Race, Shankman was presented with a script by producer Randy Barbato and asked if he could take a look at it. In its original form, the script featured one radical difference: it was going to be set onboard a plane. “I already have a target on my back,” Shankman remembered thinking to himself: ”I don’t want to remake Airplane!” Instead he suggested it be set on a train, transplanting the same sense of life-or-death urgency to one of the most boring and dependable forms of civilian transit. Thus unexpected turbulence, falling oxygen masks, and the threat of crash landings loom large in the background. As President Judy Gagwell, RuPaul plays a battle-tested member of the US army’s now-shuttered Rail Force Division, haunted by the young girl’s life she couldn’t save in a series of extended “hot flashbacks”.
In the lore of Drag Race, “Glamazonian” is a company that’s rivaled only by Acme in terms of comic corporate malfeasance. Thus the job of “rail stewardess” means aiding and abetting the bad behavior of their wealthy clientele. As the train departs the station, the bitchy, glamorous trio of first class attendants (played by Brooke Lynn Hytes, Marty Lauter and Symoné), even perform a musical number encouraging users to get their drugs out since they aren’t subject to TSA.
For a screenplay so air-tight with jokes, the cast manages to inhabit the world of the film incredibly well. As a duo, Ginger and Jujubee bring an easy if chaotic chemistry to their performances that they’ve honed in numerous theatrical productions together. Adjusting their dynamic on film, however, came with some challenges. “Adam told us, you two are not in a comedy, everybody else can be but you’re in a drama,” Jujubee reflected. “I’ll never forget it,” Ginger added, “he kept calling us ‘Lucy and Ethel’ for the first couple of days because we would do [overblown] reactions. It [was] just those theatrical instincts kicking in but we very quickly learned what level he wanted and where we could play with that.”
By committing to the seriousness, the duo were also able to leave their mark on the film with some glorious improvisation. One of the film’s most memorable sequences is an extended fight scene between the two that takes place roughly 40 feet apart from each other, as each queen goes through the motion of invisibly hair-pulling, gut-punching, and nipple-twisting the other. “We were so tired that we were just doing things to make each other laugh,” said Ginger “And then it clicked in our head that this could be funny.” “[The first time we did it] there was no reaction. It’s just dead silent. And then a couple seconds later, [Shankman] comes up and goes, ‘OK, that was good. Let’s do it again. Make it bigger. We’re like, ‘Bigger!’ We haven’t heard that at all this time!”
“They took very good care of us,” Symoné reflected. “They were like, ‘we want you to look great standing on camera, but we wanted to be comfortable for you, because you’re going to be in heels. Having Adam as the leader made our job a lot easier.”
“It was really great because we had a director who understood drag,” Brooke Lynne Hytes concurred, “so we were like, we never had to worry about any of those little things [you] usually have to worry about when you’re working with someone who’s never worked with the drag queen.”
“The thing that I’m left with was how heroic these actors are,” Shankman explained, “these guys come into work in the morning and then have to become someone else, and then that other person becomes someone else. It’s this additional layer of sort of mind bending that was really incredible. Also do not discount how uncomfortable it is to be in drag, and how uncomfortable they are for 12 hours while giving these really free, funny performances.”
“I make movies because of the joy of making them. There’s nothing fun about releasing a movie” Shankman admitted, “I mean, just the amount of internet hostility that you have to put yourself in the crosshairs of … ” Within days of meeting, the film was in hot water over whether the producers had cut corners by using AI for special effects, which Shankman denied in a statement posted to Instagram. Still, the intensity that’s surrounded that question feels like the dovetailing of two distinct anxieties: humans getting replaced with machine intelligence and a lingering anxiety about the trade-offs that a film steeped in subculture would make for its shot at the big time. Stop! That! Train! is a scrappy movie that was made for a small budget over the course of 19 days. I found the film somewhat cheesy in parts but couldn’t detect anything that felt fishy or compromised. If anything, I was taken by the sheer human effort that went into it.
Would Shankman work with drag queens in the future? “If somebody presents me with [a strong script], hell yeah, I would be happy to work with them on more serious projects because I think that the opportunity to use this pool of talent to tell more human stories is right there. It’s the orchard and we could just pick the fruit.”
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Stop! That! Train! is in US cinemas now with a UK and Australia release to follow