Delayed Reaction: Sharp Stick

Premise: A young woman goes through a sexual awakening in a very extreme way.

 

For the most part. I’m a Lena Dunham defender. I really enjoyed Girls. I saw that show as being fully aware of its characters flaws and not trying to make a broader point with them. It buried its mission statement in the pilot when Dunham’s Hannah says if she can’t be the voice for her generation, she could be a voice for a generation. It’s a very specific show that was a vessel for all of Dunham’s often challenging, sometimes problematic, sometimes myopic views. I also don’t blindly support everything of Dunham’s. Tiny Furniture isn’t entirely successful and I had to check out of Camping a couple episodes in. All this is to say that I went into Sharp Stick open to it but guarded.

 

Sometimes, I’ll hear someone say about a basketball game that if it would’ve been 5 minutes longer, the losing team would’ve won. They stumbled at the beginning of the match. By the end, the momentum was on their side but they ran out of time to overcome the deficit. That’s sort of how I feel about Sharp Stick. In balance, I really did not like this movie. Most of that comes from a first half or even 2/3s that I really hated. By the end, I began to see the movie I think it wanted to be, but it was too late to get there.

 

For me, it comes down to the main character, Sarah Jo, played by Kristine Froseth. I don’t believe the starting point for her character, which makes every beat of her story feel hollow. She’s a 26-year-old who lives in Los Angeles with her aspiring TikTok star older sister (Taylour Paige) and former party girl mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Sarah Jo works as a sort of nanny for children with special needs. What I don’t buy is that Sarah Jo at the beginning of the movie acts like she lived in an Amish community for the first 25 years of her life. She’s impossibly innocent without a hint that she’s absorbed anything from her surroundings. It would be one thing if Sarah Jo was choosing to reject all that. You know, she sees what her mother did in her life and decided she wanted to go another way. Kind of like a born-again Christian who used to snort blow off of hookers but now won’t even swear. That’s not Sarah Jo though. She genuinely responds to sex and porn like these things never occurred to her in 26 years. Sure, if I could believe the starting point for this character that the movie proposes, the story beats do make a lot of sense. Instead, there’s no indication of a life-lived before this which makes what happens in the movie pretty meaningless.

 

I’m not the first to suggest this, but it feels like a case of Dunham, who wrote and directed this (Oops. I forgot to mention that), trying to have her cake and eat it to. She writes Sarah Jo and her sister like that are 10 years younger. At that age, Sarah Jo would just be a slightly late bloomer and her curiosity is perfectly timed. It would also explain Froseth’s performance. Froseth is 26 but she still gets cast as high schoolers. She looks young. They dress her in the movie like she’s even younger than that. Everything about her in this movie reads as confused schoolgirl. Nothing about her reads as adult in arrested development. However, by making Sarah Jo 26, Dunham sidesteps anything really problematic. At 16, Sarah Jo’s affair with Jon Bernthal’s character invites critiques about grooming and even rape. At 26, she’s just a young woman making a bad decision, even if she reads as a schoolgirl.

 

As I mentioned, I very nearly came around on the movie late. Sarah Jo goes through a to-do list of sexual acts which rapidly teaches her about the world. That’s when Dunham’s strengths as a filmmaker start to show. She’s very good at finding sweetness in scenarios that shouldn’t have any. Think about how she flipped Adam’s character in the first season of Girls to actually make him a sympathetic and kind guy. She does the same thing here. She introduces Scott Speedman as Sarah Jo’s favorite pornstar and he turns out to be a good dude. And Sarah Jo’s relationship with the nice guy who works on porn sets is sweet too. Once the movie actually treats Sarah Jo like she is a person who lives in this world, it starts working. Had this movie just approached things a little more like The To-Do List, I think it could’ve really worked for me. As is, the good parts are too little too late.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend