No Hard Feelings film review — Jennifer Lawrence sex comedy is problematic but oddly likeable

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The first thing in No Hard Feelings everyone will talk about is the scene in which Jennifer Lawrence — unabashedly naked, angry as a rattlesnake — thumps three drunk pranksters on a beach for daring to steal her clothes. It’s the very essence of bawdy slapstick, precisely engineered to make viewers gasp at Lawrence’s bolshie naturism. (Even more so since the actor has been chary about onscreen nudity ever since phone-hackers leaked her naked selfies in 2014.)

But that moment of self-empowerment for Lawrence, also one of the film’s producers, exists in tension with the second thing everyone will talk about: the fact that her character, Maddie, has been hired to seduce 19-year-old Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) by his helicopter parents (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick). Maddie will be rewarded with a Buick if she helps Percy to “man-up” before going to college.

Would this sex comedy seem so breezy and amusing if the genders were flipped and a man in his thirties was hired to deflower a 19-year-old woman? Probably not — and writers John Phillips and Gene Stupnitsky (who also directs) clearly know it. In an attempt to neutralise criticisms, they slip in a mention that minor character Doug (Hasan Minhaj) was seduced when he was underage — unlike Percy — by a teacher who served time in jail for the seduction . . . and ended up marrying Doug. Elsewhere, Percy’s former “manny” Jody (Kyle Mooney) calls out Maddie for the creepiness of her assignment — only to be mocked for doing a job that’s usually women’s work. 

The gender issues are all over the place, but that’s also what makes the film interesting. It is one of the first comedies to foreground the Millennials vs Gen Z culture-clash, contrasting Maddie’s sex-positive but callow confidence with Percy’s intense fragility. With his delicate features and slight frame, Feldman makes vulnerability deeply winning here.

The film’s showstopper moment comes when Percy finally finds the courage, egged on by Maddie, to perform in front of strangers, playing the piano and crooning Hall & Oates’s 1982 hit “Maneater” with a tempo change that turns it into a sad ballad. It’s somehow both absurd and entirely fitting that his phrasing of the line “watch out boy she’ll chew you up” and Maddie’s choked-up reaction become the emotional crux of this problematic but strangely likeable movie.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas from June 23