A life spent in the service of dreams and fantasy collides with unforgiving reality: Pamela Anderson’s veteran Vegas showgirl Shelly is forced to face a future that no longer has need of her 1,000-watt smile and glitter-smeared decolletage. The third feature from Palo Alto-director Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis, niece of Sofia), The Last Showgirl is a wisp of a thing, clocking in at under 90 minutes and shot in just 18 days. The film’s structure, more a series of vignettes than a linear narrative, feels like the fleeting reflections of a life captured in the facets of a mirror ball. It’s initially tempting to dismiss the picture, like its central character with her breathy, little-girl voice, as superficial. But there’s a bruising cumulative power to this melancholy little paean to an ending era. And Anderson, whose character is left questioning not just what the future holds, but also the costly choices that shaped her past, is excellent, delivering a performance that has single-handedly rewritten the way she is viewed as an actor.

Shelly has only ever been a showgirl; with well over 30 years of service under her garter belt, she is, by no small margin, the longest-serving cast member of Le Razzle Dazzle, an old school Vegas spectacle full of rhinestones, forced smiles and barely there costumes. The show is the last of its kind. It is, says Shelly firmly, a descendent of Parisian Lido culture. But Vegas punters, it seems, no longer have the appetite for showbiz cultural relics, even if they come dolled up in ostrich feathers and nipple tassels. Le Razzle Dazzle has already lost half of its weekly shows to an X-rated adult circus. And now comes the news, delivered by the socially maladroit stage manager Eddie (a lovely, low-key, sad-sack turn from Dave Bautista) that the casino’s management has decided to close the show for good. For most of the girls, who view the gig as just another job that pays the rent, it’s an annoyance. But for Shelly, whose whole identity is wrapped up in her status as a Razzle Dazzle showgirl, it’s an existential emergency.

With just two weeks to go before the show closes and uncertainty looming, Shelly weighs her options. Her age – she tries for 36, admits to 42 (“Distance helps,” she twitters) but in fact, she’s 57 years old – counts against her. But she hauls herself on to the audition circuit anyway. Before we even see her at the film’s opening, we hear her – heels clip-clopping purposefully as she strides on to a stage to try out for a jaded producer (Jason Schwartzman). The alternative is the route taken by her friend, former showgirl Annette (a terrific Jamie Lee Curtis, brassy, brusque and baked to a crisp by the desert sun), who now serves cocktails on the casino floor in an ill-fitting tailcoat and tights so shiny they make her legs look like clingfilm-wrapped ham. To complicate matters, Shelly is also struggling to rebuild a relationship with her semi-estranged adult daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), whose childhood she largely missed in order to pursue her dream of a stage career.

It’s tempting to draw parallels between Anderson’s performance and that of Demi Moore in The Substance – both, after all, are characters whose worth to the entertainment industry has been linked to their youth and beauty, played by actors who had to deal with the same entrenched attitudes. But while Moore’s prosthetics-wrestling, Grand Guignol gurning is a lot of fun, Anderson’s is the more satisfying turn, a performance that speaks volumes in small details. There is an elegant pair of companion scenes – one early, one towards the end of the film – in which Shelly leaves voicemails for Hannah. The first is all fluttery panic, like a butterfly caught under glass; the second is sober, considered, each word weighted. There’s a whole character arc just in these two messages.