Joel on Film

About midway through I Want Your Sex, a double-sided montage communicates the duality between two kinds of intimate performance. On one side, the protagonist is engaged in a sex act with his boss—a term that means two things in this story, for the record, because it involves her being in control and him being the controlled. On the other side, he’s having sex with his girlfriend, who is not at all into it and would rather be studying for her neuropharmacology exam.

By the end of the arrangement in both cases, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is receiving words of praise from the other participant, but there’s a massive difference between the two. His boss moans and whispers words of comfort and praise to Elliot while dominating him with a whip and a few demands, but those words fundamentally uplift. His girlfriend, upon his request, begins to participate in their own private time just a bit louder than a few seconds earlier, while he tries the same tactic he learned with his mistress—a simple “thank you” to suffice.

The latter participation, though, is just an example of the girlfriend humoring Elliot. There is nothing driving those words—no power behind them, if you will—and as we learn about Elliot over the course of co-writer/director Gregg Araki’s equal-parts outrageous and raunchy film, he needs the engine. That’s what he receives with the affair on which he embarks, from a woman who basically needs nothing but the power to rev his engine (pardon the innuendo).

It should be noted that this movie, Araki’s first in quite some time, is primarily a very funny sex comedy about characters who are open and forthright and honest with each other in all the ways that matter except those that speak to their deepest desires. As Elliot is the protagonist of Araki and Karley Sciortino’s screenplay, his wants and needs are of primary concern, but to their credit, the filmmakers never forget about a few of the other characters here along the way. Minerva (Charli XCX) might be kind of a dull girlfriend to Elliot, but Araki never judges her: She needs whatever she needs, too, and Elliot is unable or unwilling to provide whatever that is.

His roommate and best friend Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), who sees herself as plain and undesirable but wishes for a sexual relationship with her own set of parameters, is just as deep a character as Elliot and the one who becomes both his dominatrix and his romantic foil. These two share everything but a bed, and in an extended and believably awkward scene, the duo decides to try a threesome. Such things, though, take preparation of an emotional variety that requires more than the right outfit or the proper amount of mouthwash.

Somehow, Araki manages the tone of all this quite well, because jokes arrive as quickly as they are dispelled by discomfort, yet nothing about this is overwhelming or alienating. Hoffman’s performance as the wholly aloof—but gradually adjusting—Elliot is likable and vulnerable. The movie, in a lot of ways, is a coming-of-age story about a boy who is technically an adult man but still naïve in the ways of love, women and intimacy, not having quite grown out of the childish ideas about all those things that his dead-on-arrival relationship with Minerva has reinforced and even dulled.

What Elliot needs is excitement, variety and a fundamental unpredictability that he finds, at first joyously, with Erika (Olivia Wilde, in a chameleonic performance that suggests much underneath but maintains a distance on the surface), an art gallery owner whose pretentiousness masks only other types and forms of pretentiousness. Their sexual arrangement begins soon after he gets a job at her gallery (doing what, alongside Mason Gooding as the flamboyant and orgiastic Zap, is anyone’s guess) as the least assuming person on staff. She sees something in his apparent haplessness, though, and that’s essentially all it takes for her to lure him into her web.

In a curious framing device, Elliot is being questioned by a pair of detectives, played by Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho, for reasons that must be discovered, and that whole bit plays into a final act that confronts some of the underlying thematic concerns here in a way that doesn’t entirely pay off. That’s fine, because until that point, outrageous and raunchy as it is, I Want Your Sex has been a compassionate examination of sexual boundaries and the parameters of consent.

Rating: *** (out of ****)