No Hard Feelings is a sex comedy without much sex and a reminder of Jennifer Lawrence’s star power

“The human body’s a cash cow — people don’t understand this,” teases a supporting character early on in No Hard Feelings, a sex comedy that distributor Sony Pictures has smartly, if overzealously, marketed as Jennifer Lawrence’s raunchy return to the theatrical box office.

The Oscar winner’s 2022 outing, Causeway, and her co-starring role in the 2021 satire Don’t Look Up, were both streaming projects that got comparatively little play in theatres. Otherwise, she’s been largely absent from moviemaking since 2017, only signing on to one film a year after a whirlwind ascent to the upper echelons of Hollywood.

We don’t get very many sex comedies anymore, thanks to the death knell of the mid-budget movie about a decade ago — these films now exist predominantly on streaming services — so No Hard Feelings is both a welcome reminder of how well the genre plays and a somewhat lost opportunity for a naughty studio flick hindered by its own premise.

Controversial premise a made-you-look hook

Lawrence plays Maddie, a 32-year-old Uber driver and bartender from Montauk, N.J., who is in danger of losing her late mother’s charming home thanks to an influx of wealthy people summering in the ocean-front town and driving up property taxes. After her car gets scooped in a court-ordered asset seizure (by her forlorn ex Gary, no less), Maddie loses her primary source of income and turns to Craigslist.

There, she finds a curious ad that seems to match her desperation: two rich parents are looking for someone to date their awkward, lonely, 19-year-old son, and they’re willing to shell out for it.

Maddie pops on a pink choker necklace, a colourful knapsack, a pair of cumbersome roller blades and a too-tight, busty blue dress — the uniform of a thirty-something trying to pass for a teen — and arrives to the ultra-modern mansion where they live with their son.

Allison and Laird (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick, looking perfectly bourgeois in beige linen and polite, empty smiles) are well-intentioned parents of the helicopter variety: they hover around their only child, Percy, meddling in his life, trying everything to boost his lacklustre social skills. When we meet them they’re officially in crisis mode, resorting to paying someone to date their son.

Might Maddie be too old for the gig, mom and dad wonder, eyeing her piecemeal gen-Z outfit? Of course not, she reasons, and they won’t even have to pay cash: as long as she can have their old Buick and get the Uber gig back to pay her bills, she’ll date the hell out of young Percy. Allison and Laird come around fairly quickly.

Maddie has just one more question: “When you say date him, do you mean date him or date him?” she asks, cautiously.

“Yes,” Allison responds.

The non-answer is a cheeky wink to an audience that has no idea what they’re in for — or it would be if there didn’t seem to be some hesitance on the part of the team behind the movie. Director Gene Stupnitsky said in a recent interview that they “took great pains to be careful about the ick factor.”

That’s just it — No Hard Feelings might be vulgar, but it has very little sex for a sex comedy. Despite that, it wouldn’t be surprising if modern audiences were put off by a story where an adult woman dates a teenager.

The movie’s conceit is really a made-you-look hook for a likeable film about overbearing parents (it’s based on a real-life Craigslist ad that one of the producers found) and the stuck-in-teenagehood paralysis that plagues both millennials and their gen-Z counterparts in different ways.

Delightful pairing

Maddie stages a meet-cute with Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), equal parts sweetie pie and prudish stickler. While he’s oblivious to her true intentions, they find that they have a lot in common.

Neither could go to their high school prom (Maddie due to sadness brought on by her absent father, Percy because he didn’t ask anyone); they both feel burdened by the hand that life has dealt them (she’s in frightening debt to the government, he has rich, annoying parents); and they both care for each other, though this naturally evolves into the movie’s central conflict.

Lawrence and Feldman are delightfully paired and their best scenes highlight their characters’ generational differences. When Percy gets angry with Maddie and jets off to a high school party in rebellion, she follows and arrives to the joint a fish out of water, haplessly wading through a sea of VR-goggle-wearing gen-Zers trying to catch her saying something problematic on a livestream. Doesn’t anybody have sex anymore, she wonders?

But the wildest moment in No Hard Feelings is an absolutely bonkers fight scene that is both unexpected and a riot; it’s really the only sequence that warrants the film’s R-rating. To tee it up without saying too much, some of Maddie’s possessions are stolen by a group of teens while she’s skinny dipping in the ocean — and she goes after them.

WATCH | The trailer for No Hard Feelings: 

Lawrence deftly swerves between emotion and slapstick

Watching Lawrence command a full-blown comedy as she does here is a painful reminder of how few young, A-list actors there are working regularly in Hollywood today who could single-handedly draw moviegoers to a theatre.

In Lawrence, we have a bankable, Oscar-friendly movie star, and that she’s willing to step out of the Venn diagram of awards fare and ensemble dramedy in favour of a fun, 2000s-style studio comedy is our privilege to witness.

I wish the movie had committed more to the promise of class commentary that it goes full throttle with in the first half. By the time a predictably neat resolution falls into place, Maddie’s gentrification woes are underdeveloped and remain firmly in plot device territory. 2015’s Joy, in which Lawrence starred as the rags-to-riches inventor of the miracle mop, is more effective on that front.

Yet No Hard Feelings serves up a charming story about two risk-averse people terrified by life’s unpredictability: while Percy is afraid of adulthood, rule-breaking and being unchained from his parents, Maddie is afraid of failing her mother and of leaving her hometown on the off-chance that her absent father might decide to be present in her life.

Lower case-s sex comedy as it is, No Hard Feelings hits the right marks — and Lawrence’s deft swerving between those emotional moments and the silly physical slapstick make it well worth a trip to the theatre.

No Hard Feelings is now playing in Canadian theatres.