With her Sundance movie Sharp Stick, the Girls creator again mocks the self-delusions of her own tribe.
With her Sundance movie Sharp Stick, the Girls creator again mocks the self-delusions of her own tribe.
H ere’s a perfectly 2020s moment at the movies: A confused young woman who is out to prove something or other seeks out a total stranger online in order to be sexually degraded, but makes sure to ask whether he’s been tested. Tested? He assures her that he doesn’t have any STDs and also promises to wear a facial mask.
To a certain segment of the younger population, sex with someone you haven’t so much as had a conversation with is less of a worry than being breathed on. Lena Dunham knows this cohort well and once again examines it with a forensic eye in her new film Sharp Stick, which just debuted at this year’s (virtual) Sundance Film Festival.
When Dunham’s HBO series Girls wrapped up five years ago, I wrote that the show was “a prosecutorial indictment of Millennial self-absorption and entitlement. If, in other words, you can’t stand real-life Lena Dunham, writer Lena Dunham has your back.” In Sharp Stick, her third feature as a director, Dunham creates the feel of the 1990s indie films of Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, etc.), a funny but cringey mix of pain, weirdness, satire, and deeply awkward attempts at human connection that is almost too real to be quite bearable. If you like your movies to come with a sugar coating, look elsewhere, but Dunham grasps the truth here, and the truth is conservative.
Sharp Stick — the reference is to what a physician tells a child when administering a jab, as though sexual misadventures constitute a healing inoculation — takes a damning look at the new porn-saturated expectations for young people’s sexuality and concludes by reaffirming the conservative position: Stop doing this to yourselves, Dunham begs her viewers, and re-learn the art of dating and romance. Giving the message a tinge of irony, she arranges for it to be delivered by a porn actor.
Dunham’s protagonist, Sarah Jo, is a comically naive 26-year-old Los Angeles special-ed teacher played by Kristine Froseth in a performance that is sure to grab a lot of attention for the drastic switchback the role requires in mid-movie. As though to signal that the movie is an update of Looking for Mr. Goodbar for the age of Instagram, Sarah Jo is not only a seemingly guileless teacher but also suffered a traumatic medical emergency as a child.
A virgin who longs to burst out of her shell sexually, she targets for her first conquest the doting father (Jon Bernthal) of a boy with Down Syndrome whose mother, played by Dunham, is hugely pregnant, tense, emotional, overscheduled, and difficult. Dunham’s refusal to flatter herself here by making her character a fount of reason or stability is, as it was in Girls, a rare and refreshing quality, and she once again gives the audience ample reason to sympathize with those who have to deal with her character’s big baggage.
Everything about the film feels genuine and honest, albeit strange, such as the offbeat background story of Sarah Jo’s family. The young woman’s more glamorous and experienced sister, a budding Instagram influencer named Treina (played with gusto by Taylour Paige), is black and was adopted on the spot, while still in utero, after Sarah Jo’s mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) spotted her biological mother looking sad at a furrier’s. Gradually, it emerges that the girls’ mom, Marilyn, has spent her life having casual sex with a parade of forgotten men. In a very Dunham moment, Treina (her mom named her “reina” for queen, plus a T for truth) informs her sister that the takeaway from this lifetime of self-defeating behavior is the following: “Say what you will about Mom, but she understands this one important fact: There is always another one and another one and another one.”
These people are severely flawed, and yet in all cases Dunham gives them solid, human motivations. As we’re squirming and laughing, we also nod in sympathy. (Who wouldn’t be looking for escape if he were married to Lena Dunham?)
Bernthal’s character makes some deeply questionable decisions, but Dunham makes the character complicated enough to nudge us toward understanding his behavior. (Girls was notably harsher on its female characters than the guys, a measure of Dunham’s resistance to the clichés that tend to underlie female-driven narratives.) Dunham specializes in using her own characters’ words to undercut their contentions: Treina declares that men “are all just waiting to reveal their scumminess, even the good ones.” She’s angry because her boyfriend is insufficiently loyal to her. But a second later, she reveals that she isn’t sure who the father of her unborn child is. Oops.
Meanwhile, Dunham uses Sarah Jo to mock the female-empowerment industry, with its upbeat ballads and its anything-goes take on sexuality. Completely missing the point of an affair that goes wrong, she starts to wonder, “Am I bad at sex?” and sets out to educate herself in what she considers the norms of human intimacy, which are actually just the sordid caricatures found in pornography.
Dunham is acutely observant of the follies that have taken hold among her peers, and it’s unfortunate for us that she has taken such a long break from dissecting them. Millennials and Gen Z deserve to be exposed to much more of Dunham’s brand of clever and sympathetic criticism of her own tribe.