Exclusive: Sugar Daddy Trailer Highlights Complexities Faced by Its Starving Artist

Nothing says “Happy International Women’s Day!” quite like a trailer for a film about a woman’s becoming. Director Wendy Morgan’s Sugar Daddy follows Darren (Kelly McCormack, who also wrote the script), a struggling musician who begins dating older men through a sugar daddy website to fund her life and artistic passions.

While Sugar Daddy’s synopsis may appear to have twinges of girl bossism, the film’s trailer—which we exclusively debut below—suggests that the story is less interested in exploring a woman artist’s powerful triumph over her circumstance and more interested in honoring the gendered plight that both sugar babies and women in the music world are subjected to.

Take a look:

The film’s not grounded in Darren’s dabbling in the dating-for-money world, but rather in its focus upon the unsexy preludes striving artists experience. Unlike Almost Famous or A Star is Born, Sugar Daddy centralizes the underrepresented era before an artist’s dream is realized; an era marked by a multitude of part-time jobs, financial anxiety and the strain for artistic integrity.

Sugar Daddy’s trailer heavily features experimental techno-adjacent sounds, ostensibly offering snippets of the music Darren makes. It seems that elements of Darren’s musical experimentation are also integrated into the film through otherworldly sequences in which black fluids teem from Darren’s mouth and she emerges out of a swiveling car like a prom queen from the future.