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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Lena Dunham’s ‘Sharp Stick’ has a point to make, but what is it?

By Ann Hornaday Washington Post

It’s been an interesting summer for women’s sexual self-discovery. No sooner have we watched Emma Thompson joyfully let herself go in the charming “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” than Lena Dunham explores strikingly similar territory, with far more discomfiting – albeit no less revelatory – results.

Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) lives with her mother Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and sister Treina (Taylour Paige) in a cramped apartment in Los Angeles, where Treina is trying to become TikTok famous and Marilyn sort of manages the other units in the shabby low-rise building. Sarah Jo helps care for the son of a real estate agent named Heather (Dunham) and her puppyish stay-at-home husband Josh (Jon Bernthal). At 26, the childlike Sarah Jo is still a virgin, a situation she’s ready to address by any means necessary, regardless of the ethics, safety or psychic harm they may involve.

It’s a pivotal moment, made all the more treacherous by Sarah Jo’s startling naivete, underscored by the little barrettes she puts in her hair and clothing choices that lie somewhere in between thrift-store chic and Amish. As she embarks on an alternately aggressive and awkward sentimental self-education, she’s working from a depressingly limited road map, as far as her own pleasure and desires are concerned. She’s a vessel for all the warped cultural messages she’s received about men, sex and love, whether by way of media, her oversharing mother’s opportunistic serial marriages or her sister’s commodified solipsism.

In a director’s statement, Dunham has said she intended “Sharp Stick” to be an honest exploration of women’s sexual journeys, in all their excitement and regret, that doesn’t end in tragedy or recrimination. As she observes, cinema hasn’t been kind to these heroines: “Men get ‘Alfie’ – the freewheeling Brit with a theme song and a remake. Women get ‘Repulsion.’ “

It’s a fair point, and at its best, “Sharp Stick” offers moments of breathtaking candor when it comes to dramatizing the lurching, lonely, sometimes ecstatic stops along the way to erotic satisfaction. It also offers plenty of humor, even though it’s as squirm-inducing as it is spot on, especially when Dunham exhibits her gift for observant humor. She has assembled an outstanding cast of actors who deliver their own versions of courageous performances: Recalling her character in “In the Cut,” Leigh offers a tone-perfect rendition of a blowzy former golden girl, embittered but hanging on to hope by way of New Age aphorisms; Bernthal continues his recent fantastic run in a turn that’s simultaneously charming and creepy. (Fans of “The Bear” will smile when Ebon Moss-Bachrach shows up as Josh’s best friend, Yuli.) Scott Speedman makes the most of a brief but crucial appearance as an unlikely shaman late in the proceedings.

Strangely, the weakest link in “Sharp Stick” might be Sarah Jo – a naif so innocent and so unworldly that she feels less like a fully realized human than a symbol. As a creature virtually void of form, she makes for excruciating viewing as she makes her ungainly way through the challenges she’s set for herself; one wonders if “Sharp Stick” might have benefited from a central figure a little less doe-eyed.

It’s not entirely clear what we’re meant to make of Dunham’s film, which reads like a cri de coeur one moment and a boldly bawdy comedy of manners the next. Uneven, ambiguous and unnerving, “Sharp Stick” undoubtedly has a point to make. What that is, precisely, might be subject to debate.