No Hard Feelings fumbles awkwardly through teen sex comedy paint-by-numbers

In a political climate where libraries across the Midwest are in danger of being defunded for fear of harboring sexual groomers and their propaganda, the biggest comedy in the cineplex is a tale of woe where Jennifer Lawrence can’t get a kid to fuck her. 2023 is goddamn weird, man.

No Hard Feelings follows Maddie Barker (Lawrence), a Montauk bartender and Uber driver, who owes thousands in taxes on the house her mother left her and has also had her car repossessed. With limited time to bank her nest egg for the year, profiting off the “summer people” in the vacation community, desperation has turned her towards an unlikely sex work-adjacent offer. Allison and Laird Becker (Laura Benanti / Matthew Broderick) are a wealthy couple seeking a “companion” in her 20s to seduce their son.

The 19-year-old Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) spends his time volunteering at a dog shelter and playing online games, while mastering the piano (a skill he won’t perform in front of anyone) and his parents are worried that he’ll burn out when he attends Princeton if he retains this level of mega-introvert behavior. Perry’s father Laird had an adolescent sexual experience with a woman that brought him out of his shell, and would be more than happy to donate a Buick to Maddie, in exchanges for her services in providing a similar experience to “save” Percy.

Gene Stupnitsky (Bad Teacher, Good Boys) brings his signature comedic inconsistency to a summer sex comedy that never really sticks the landing—nor does it ever really give an indication in what general area the landing zone might have been intended to exist.

Ostensibly, the film exists to deliver on the premise of “Jennifer Lawrence in a hard R-rated comedy,” and that seems like a difficult mark to miss. If the concept was to provide a teen sex shocker, the final product here is far too timid to provide much in that category.

No Hard Feelings carries a general air of walking on eggshells around its own identity. Whenever the comedy feels like it might be ramping up towards anything more transgressive than slapstick and cursing, there are sudden jarring slams on the breaks for pivots into cartoonish sincerity or, worse, disorienting trauma.

Throughout, Stupnitsky’s intended targets—performative gender, class warfare, taxes—take a backseat to distractingly more interesting ideas. While used mostly to further the plot without spending too much time dwelling on it, this movie’s greatest success is its exploration of the raw disconnect between Gen Z, Millennials, and Boomers. Maddie’s failing efforts to win over Percy—following a playbook set forward by his parents whose motivation/fears are based in the same distant culture as their generation’s wealth—traps Lawrence in this space where she’s attempting to translate languages that she herself doesn’t speak. When it’s revealed why Percy is less than outgoing, the reveal is based in something so complicated and poorly explored that it instantly derails whatever else was going on here.

Thinking that it needed to give too much weight to explain why Lawrence would do a sex comedy, this film leaned in on trying to bolster its realness and grounded characters. In the absence of more than a handful of scenes even bordering on laugh-out-loud, the result is that No Hard Feelings comes off more as a trauma dump.

It’s difficult to shake the sense that, scene by scene, these are simply variations on a single pitch for a Saturday Night Live sketch, and the movie is Stupnitsky’s attempt to find one framing that works. Lawrence is by far and away the best part of the picture, but the film also lives and dies on a full runtime where—like SNL—these moments are designed around a required acknowledgment of who is hosting the show. Are any of the moments in this comedy actually funny, or are they only funny because we are watching Jennifer Lawrence, an actress that traditionally would not be in these situations, performing Jennifer Lawrence’s reactions to the events?

No Hard Feelings isn’t bad, but it’s too safe to say anything more than platitudes like “hurt people hurt people,” and for that, it’s simply a release that no one will remember come 2024.

There was an opportunity for something really interesting here, and a lot of the elements remain—especially around the ideas of generational identity, self, sexuality, and what a teen sex comedy even means in a world where (most) of the characters would have understood what to do with an asexual lead. Instead, there’s a naked fight on the beach and some life lessons that are fully unearned, as boxes are ticked off a ‘to do’ list.

Sincerely hope you have more fun with it than we did.