Careening wildly through a high school house party to which she was not invited, 30-something Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) realizes that she’s being inserted into a bunch of smarmy TikToks against her will; after telling two leering bros that they should get with each other and leave her alone, she’s accused of being politically incorrect and asked to leave by the host’s parents. Before she goes, though, she surveys the scene—a bunch of teenagers fingering their iPhones instead of each other—and lets forth a primal scream of frustration: “Doesn’t anybody fuck anymore?”
It’s not a rhetorical question. The bet being made by the makers of No Hard Feelings is that audiences will identify with Lawrence’s exasperated anguish, which doubles as a barely disguised thesis statement against the prudishness of this postmillennial moment, the “puriteen” label analyzed and debunked in think pieces across the internet. Film culture is implicated as well: Take, for example, the endless cycle of tweets carping about the superfluousness of movie sex scenes that don’t “drive the plot forward,” a complaint that not only ignores the long and proud history of cinema as a vessel for channeling erotic fantasies but seems to have infected the minds of filmmakers as well. Quick: Name the last great big-studio sex comedy. Or even the last decent one. Girls Trip? Trainwreck? Does They Came Together count? Where have you gone, Stifler’s mom? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Genuine, good-natured raunchiness is at a premium these days, and therein lies the promise of Gene Stupnitsky’s film, which arrives boasting a hard-R rating and an A-list leading lady who’s seemingly game for anything—including embodying the (relative) depravity of the generation that came of age before OnlyFans and Pornhub and that feels nostalgic for the good(ish) old days of prom-night hookups. If No Hard Feelings had dug deeper into its rich, fertile sociological subtext—if it had truly committed to satirizing the contrasting sexual attitudes and anxieties of millennials and zoomers, or social media addiction as an anti-aphrodisiac—it could have been a small classic. As it is, it’s a slightly clunky but ultimately serviceable starring vehicle for Lawrence, whose performance as a cash-strapped opportunist (secretly) being paid to initiate a virginal, Ivy League–bound outcast represents the most skilled and affecting acting of her career—she delivers a screwy, humane tour de force that levitates above the script’s obstacle course of clichés.
It’s not quite right to call No Hard Feelings a comeback. After giving good stoner in Don’t Look Up, Lawrence put in a solid shift in naturalistic indie-drama mode in last year’s Causeway, which she also produced; cast as a damaged army vet struggling to re-assimilate into her old life, she disappeared into the role and held her own opposite the great (and Oscar-nominated) Brian Tyree Henry. But her role in No Hard Feelings as a lanky, neurotic heroine does mark a return to the sort of virtuosic seriocomic acting that earned her an Academy Award for Silver Linings Playbook, albeit minus the smug, shrill pushiness that could be called the David O. Russell touch. In Silver Linings, and then especially American Hustle, Lawrence skirted manic pixie territory, pirouetting through a series of show-offy set pieces—the “Live and Let Die” scene in American Hustle may as well have been captioned “For Your Consideration.”
Where Russell emphasized his star’s wattage—sometimes to a blinding degree—No Hard Feelings begins with Lawrence in low-key mode. Maddie is a stifled small-town scrapper clinging to her pride—and her late mother’s adorable little house—amid a cycle of obnoxious seasonal interlopers and interchangeable lovers. No Hard Feelings is set in the vacation hot spot of Montauk, and the early scenes vibrate with some of the same regional specificity as the best Farrelly brothers films without condescending to the location or the characters. It’s clear that Maddie is caught in a tourist trap, but also that she’s her own worst enemy. When she tries to tempt her unimpressed mechanic ex (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) out of towing her repossessed car—and slowly realizes that her latest one-night stand is stretching shirtless behind her—Lawrence’s lack of scruples and/or shame is funny because it’s so unapologetic; hapless but not remotely helpless, she’s funny without being a punch line.
For the first 20 minutes or so, No Hard Feelings gets by solely on Lawrence’s jaded, ornery charisma, while a few incongruous sight gags hint that the filmmakers will tap into some submerged smarts—a shot of a character reading the infamous bestiality-themed Canadian novel Bear is one of the weirdest literary allusions in any movie, ever. And then the plot machinery starts creaking. We see that Maddie is self-sufficient and smart, resigned to playing peanut gallery to her pregnant pal and fellow cabana server Sarah (Natalie Morales) and Sarah’s lovably mediocre surfer-dude husband (Scott MacArthur); their gentle bickering suggests an intimacy beyond Maddie’s recent purview. Sadly, she can’t monetize sarcasm, and with her car out of commission, she can’t cover her nut driving Uber at night. In a precarious gig economy where tax collectors have set their sights on her home, what’s a girl to do? Cue Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti as a prosperous couple dangling a free Buick on Craigslist, provided that Maddie—who’s a bit older than the ad calls for—agrees to “date” their 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). “I’ll date his brains out,” Maddie promises after a face-to-face meeting at the couple’s steel-and-glass mansion, which features a sloping, mountainous driveway right out of Parasite.
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The idea that Maddie agrees to become Miss American Pie and participate in what is basically an ad hoc prostitution scheme out of some noble anti-gentrification impulse is left underdeveloped; as an exercise in class warfare, No Hard Feelings is shooting blanks. It doesn’t matter much, though, because the basic situation—no matter how contrived—works like gangbusters. Slinking into Percy’s workplace in a low-cut pink dress, Maddie’s lack of dignity is carefully calculated: She’s trying to style herself like the average porn junkie’s wet dream, playing on a presumptuous contempt for adolescent horniness. The problem is that Percy’s defense systems are stronger than expected and deeply embedded in his subconscious: Crammed into a corner booth at a bar, he reacts to the sound of a breaking eight ball like it’s gunfire and confides that he’s been terrified since childhood of Hall & Oates’s “Maneater,” which he claims is about an actual predatory monster. Maddie is up for a challenge, but the harder she pushes, the more she starts channeling Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: She won’t be ignored, to the point that she ends up getting maced in the face.
Speaking of the Farrelly brothers, there’s a little bit of slapstick abjection that keeps popping up throughout No Hard Feelings, which also includes hives, vomiting, and some brutal, accidental punches to the face. A little lack of vanity goes a long way, and Lawrence manages to undermine her own sex appeal without extinguishing it—a tricky balancing act. Her physical comedy peaks during an extended beach confrontation with a bunch of mouth-breathing teens that features full-frontal nudity and a Kurt Angle–style German suplex, both of which are delivered by the actress with a trouper’s unselfconscious dedication. Suffice it to say that not since Viggo Mortensen battled through the bathhouse in Eastern Promises has an A-list star let it all hang out like this in a fight sequence. It’s not the stuff that Oscar nominations are made of, perhaps, but it’s iconic all the same.
It’s surely not a spoiler to reveal that, at some point during her mercenary scheme, Maddie develops feelings for her underage mark—complicated, protective ones that Lawrence portrays with real aplomb, including in a scene when she listens to a piano rendition of “Maneater” as emotions play across her face like she’s Nicole Kidman at the opera in Birth. Maddie was a teenage dirtbag once too, and while the script works too hard to draw emotional parallels between her and Percy, the actors keep their rapport plausibly affectionate (an abortive lap dance scored by Nelly devolves into some pricelessly reversed choreography). Whether or not the movie gets too sentimental is hard to say. If the satisfaction in seeing two damaged, essentially decent people learning to trust each other seems antithetical to the kind of sleazy, skeezy shtick promised by the setup, it’s also nice to see a movie that understands that kindness and crudeness aren’t mutually exclusive.
It’ll be interesting to see whether No Hard Feelings succeeds on the strength of Lawrence’s presence, especially since her last real above-the-title release was Mother! (which she gave the proverbial college try). It’s also worth speculating whether the film will generate even a fraction of the controversy that hit Licorice Pizza, which recently served as ground zero in a larger debate about the ethics of depicting (and not necessarily even endorsing) age-gap romances. (Wait until Letterboxd users learn about To Have and Have Not.) Those with a mind to overreact could take Maddie’s carefully stage-managed seduction as an act of grooming—one called out in the film by an underused Kyle Mooney as a sinister adult nanny who seems to have wandered in from a Happy Madison production—or the too-pat ending as a way of glossing over potentially thorny material. The second charge sticks, and in the end, the film isn’t as transgressive as it wants (or needs) to be to spark a resurrection of ’80s-style raunch: Crucially, its money shot remains hidden from view. But in the same way that Maddie goes Lydia Tár on Percy’s peers for their collective inability to take a (dirty) joke, No Hard Feelings is nicely unapologetic about its mild provocations and the possibility that a movie about getting off isn’t getting away with murder. The title is a double entendre, of course, but it’s the second, less explicit meaning that’s worth paying attention to: No Hard Feelings doesn’t mean any harm, and more power to it.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.