By M. Faust

I suspect I’m not the only one who, on seeing an unexpected name in different lists of awards nominees, thought, “Huh, there must be another actress named Pamela Anderson.” Who would have expected the one-time star of “Baywatch” to be singled out for giving one of the year’s best performances by a leading actress?

But it is one and the same Ms. Anderson who stars in “The Last Showgirl,” in a role that, if it wasn’t written for her, certainly might have been. She plays Shelly, whose entire professional career has been spent onstage in Las Vegas in a revue called “Le Razzle Dazzle.”

Shelly tends to romanticize the show, linking it to the Parisian tradition of cabaret entertainment, but another character is probably more accurate in dismissing it as the kind of “tits and feathers” spectacle that Vegas used to specialize in. After 28 years, the producers have decided to pack it in, forcing Shelly, at the age of 57, to look for a new job in a field that has pretty much disappeared.

There isn’t a lot of plot in The Last Showgirl, and what little there is gets parceled out at regular intervals as if the filmmakers felt that we needed to be prodded awake every 15 minutes or so.

Most of the brief running time (under 90 minutes) is taken up with Shelly talking with her fellow dancers (most of whom are half her age), with her hard-bitten friend Annette (an unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis), with the daughter she abandoned years ago (Billie Lourd) and with the show’s stage manager (Dave Bautista), with whom she has a personal history.

Given that Anderson is just about the entire raison d’etre for the movie’s existence, you are likely asking, Is she all that good? Which turns out to be a hard question to answer, because I don’t know what the movie expects us to make of Shelly.

Is she a tragic victim who sold her youth and beauty in a bad bargain? Or is she a ninny who has spent her life living in a dream world that has inevitably come crashing down around her? Neither director Gia Coppola (Francis’ granddaughter) nor writer Kate Gersten (a Coppola cousin; Jason Schwartzman, another cousin, shows up for a small role) seems to have a firm grasp on Shelly.

You also can’t help but wonder how much Anderson, who surely felt a personal connection to the material, might have reshaped her performance as she saw fit.

It doesn’t help that the film’s small budget (reportedly about $2 million: surely the stars worked well below their standard pay levels) made impossible a fuller presentation of the show Shelly has devoted her life to so that we might decide if it had any value.

There is a lot to like about The Last Showgirl, which at its best plays like the kind of observational character study that the 1970s cinema gave us so many of. It’s worth a look, but you might want to dial down the expectations that the awards buzz may have created for you.