The first part of the film shows a teenage Martha, played by an actor, hanging out with a group of friends and flirting with boys in a car.

The camera abruptly cuts to the actors speaking with Coolidge about their choices in staging and acting out the scene.

The actor playing Curly examines his own participation in a culture that objectifies women, recounting how he used to go to a local college to pick up "pigs," promiscuous girls he could sleep with.

"[4] She noted, "In other movies from the Seventies and Eighties, women were employing similar hybrid forms as a means to share their marginalized experiences with a certain amount of distance for the sake of their psyches.

Michelle Citron's Daughter Rite (1980), Kay Armatage's Striptease (1980), and Marilú Mallet's Unfinished Diary (1982) all fall into this category.

[4] In 2020, Richard Brody of The New Yorker included Not a Pretty Picture in his list of the Sixty-Two Best Documentaries of All Time.