A post-feminist sex fantasy beats the competition.
Lena Dunham, who originated the six-season HBO series Girls, is not to be outdone by HBO’s rival soft-core hit Euphoria. Her new film, Sharp Stick, presents the curiosity and initiation of Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), a 26-year-old slowly adjusting to contemporary sexual life. It’s writer-director-actress Dunham’s comic response to Euphoria’s lurid melodrama — a critique of that show’s Zendaya-in-Pornland premise.
Sarah Jo’s young womanhood is stymied after a radical hysterectomy at age 15 (“I had a double uterus, everything stuck together like bubble gum”). This personal trauma replaces Euphoria’s merely topical disaffection through drugs. Dunham reclaims the territory sketched by her 2011 semi-autobiographical debut, Tiny Furniture, which interestingly revealed class privilege and personal prerogative.
Dunham first shows Sarah Jo taping an exhibitionist vlog for her sister Treina (Taylour Paige), who vamps and twerks to Khia’s hip-hop classic “My Neck, My Back” (the lyrics venture even lower). Daughters of different fathers, these white and black siblings receive license from their oft-married alternative-lifestyle mother, Marilyn (that uncannily radical Jennifer Jason Leigh), who encourages TikTok generation impudence: “You gotta grind. Some of these girls are posting 15 times a day. I swear they’re doing speed.”
Not since Quentin Tarantino has an American spearheaded a genre that would influence a generation of media makers as Dunham did with Girls. (Although Tiny Furniture wasn’t a hit, she and QT crossed paths in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.) Sarah Jo and Treina represent Millennial competitiveness, embodying race-sex notions that are hidden in American culture — but satirized in comedian Julie Brown’s Madonna-parody album Trapped in the Body of a White Girl. That’s the subject Sharp Stick brings into the open.
Because Euphoria ripped off Girls, using more explicit salaciousness, Dunham is forced to up the ante. Sarah Jo starts out mousey, dressed in pinafores, and then progresses from sexually retarded into a boundless experimenter.
What Tarantino is to adolescent-male film noir, Dunham is to post-feminist comedy — her private fantasies modernize narrative conventions. When prim yet itchy Sarah Jo seduces Josh (Jon Bernthal), the father of her babysitting charge, Josh’s L.A.-dude-loser side releases the beast in Sarah Jo, which prompts tension with his pregnant wife Heather (Dunham). This triangle of misfits is prime distasteful Dunham. Each adult reflects the deficiencies of the children in the plot who have Down syndrome and cerebral palsy.
I disliked the brazenness of Girls, which seemed to exploit cable TV for outrage, but Dunham (who made a star of Adam Driver’s sensuality) clearly knows how sexual culture operates, and Sharp Stick does it again. Despite current gender ambiguity, Dunham studies male-female upheaval. (Sarah Jo is contrasted to her slutty sister, Josh is superficially masculine — Bernthal’s wily macho specialty — and Dunham plays Heather as oafish and insecure.) She penetrates feminist appearances to reveal hidden self-loathing. Sarah Jo reads Frantumaglia, by Elena Ferrante, the celebrated pseudonymous novelist behind Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film The Lost Daughter, prior to embarking on her Josh-inspired study of pornography.
Sharp Stick satirizes young-adult sexual activity. Dunham’s protective view of Sarah Jo’s naïveté had seemed a way of defending female privilege. At this point, though, Dunham commits her comedy and drama to documenting contemporary sexual dysfunction, exposing how Sarah Jo’s puerility is a defining trait of the generation lost to feminist extremes and cultural decadence.
Dunham is funnier than Euphoria and more honest than Eighth Grade and Promising Young Woman. Dealing with the lunacies of Hillary-era feminism, she makes no excuses. Marilyn throws a “Next Time” baby shower with golden balloons to celebrate Treina’s abortion and toasts the bizarre philosophy of “Love can neither be created nor destroyed. We show this child that it was wanted even if it could not be completed.”
This scene (“speaking to the power of ritual,” Marilyn says) falls short of its Todd Solondz potential. Dunham’s conceit combines the realistic sleaze of Red Rocket and the gynophobic conceptual fantasy of Todd Haynes’s Safe. Viewing pornography as “a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” Dunham takes issue with disingenuous junk like Euphoria that promotes degradation. Sharp Stick often seems like a series of unrealized TV pilots, a reminder that Dunham’s mentor is Judd Apatow. Sarah Jo’s self-education through the ABCs of porn stunts is resolved with advice from her favorite sex actor, Vance Leroy (Scott Speedman), who advises her, “Be proud of your scars!” That’s Dunham’s self-defense message to the millennium.