Sharp Stick Review: Lena Dunham’s Sex Comedy Is an Awkward Miscalculation

Lena Dunham’s comedy Sharp Stick initially displays the disarming precocity of a transgressively oddball delayed-coming-of-age story. Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) is a 26-year-old virgin who seems at least a decade younger and has an affair with an older married man. It’s a complex situation, given that the man, Josh (Jon Bernthal), has a pregnant wife (Dunham), is the father of the developmentally challenged boy whom Sarah Jo was hired to help out with, and consummates their relationship on the floor of his laundry room. But after her affair with Josh is abruptly interrupted and the film transforms into a look at Sarah Jo becoming a kind of sexual autodidact through her increasing obsession with pornography, it sheds most of the charm that had been sustaining this ultimately aimless story.

Dunham does the audience a disservice by surrounding Sarah Jo with quirky and intensely funny characters who easily overshadow her. Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is her many-times-divorced mother, who forever tells stories of a youth spent on the outskirts of Hollywood with “musty little ghouls in suits,” when she’s not dispensing career and relationship advice to Sarah Jo’s social media starlet of a sister, Treina (Taylour Paige). The scenes where Marilyn and Treina chatter away like stoned teenagers while a mostly silent and ignored Sarah Jo takes care of all adulting duties have an easy and grounded comedic flow that the rest of the film lacks.

Though Sarah Jo’s home life might scan like something out of a low-rent Cinderella update, Josh is no prince. Once Josh abandons his pretense of not wanting to sleep with Sarah Jo and they find better spots for their assignations than in front of the washing machine, the affair loses much of its charge. The first scenes in which Sarah Jo and Josh break the boundaries of the older employer-younger employee relationship are shot with a natural spontaneity, with both of them realistically flustered and fumbling. But too quickly, Dunham shifts their affair into a more conventional tone that distances the film from the chaotic emotions at play. This less revealing approach is particularly obvious in a montage showing one of the couple’s nights together, which is directed with all the soft gleam of an Adrian Lyne heavy-breather.

But Sharp Stick also fails to give Sarah Jo enough depth to sustain any interest in the tumult of her suppressed emotions exploing into the open. Any laughs to be had as Sarah Jo does her online sex homework with an odd, X-rated Tracy Flick determination—such as her studiously taking notes and making wall posters with checklists of different sex positions—are undermined by her acting in many ways with the emotional maturity of a pre-adolescent. There are scenes in Dunham’s film that try to mine comedy out of Sarah Jo’s lunging abrasiveness, such as one where she storms up to Josh and his wife and starts shouting the different ways that she’s had sex since being dumped by him. But eventually those moments begin to feel more like warnings of an impending mental breakdown.

Some elements of Sharp Stick recall Dunham’s script for Ry Russo-Young’s Nobody Walks, another L.A.-set story about a younger woman with a somewhat flat affect sleeping with an older married man. But while Sarah Jo’s exploration of sexuality through pornography would seem to be the sort of thing that one of the characters on Girls might have gotten up to in a particularly manic or bored moment, her character’s lack of any emotional arc or inner development means that the scenes have little resonance. As disappointing as it is confusing, the film shows that while Dunham still knows how to write and cast captivating secondary players—just about everybody here brings a lively pop to their performances—her preference for solipsistic protagonists with boundary issues has its limitations.