‘Sharp Stick’ Review: Lena Dunham’s Provocative Tale of Sexual Awakening Tackles Thorny Material with Compassion [Sundance]

Playing in the Premieres section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Sharp Stick,” produced during lockdown, was conceived by Lena Dunham and the film’s director of photography, Ashley Connor, starting from the base elements that were already available to them — namely a set of actors and locations. But while many quarantine-made films have appeared to embrace a “will this do?” aesthetic, implicitly relying on the audience’s sympathy and compassionate understanding to fill gaps and forgive compromises in production value, Dunham has instead created a work of art that comfortably fits within and plays with the limitations imposed by the pandemic.

Yet this feat is easily obscured by another: namely, the impressive ease with which “Sharp Stick” succeeds in sustaining the viewer’s interest and compassion during some of the most disconcerting and potentially disturbing scenes to come out of this year’s festival so far. Simply put, Dunham has not lost her habit of exploring taboo and shocking scenarios. But just like this new film’s fluid, low key visual style and bright, poppy production design, the coming-of-age story it presents feels so organically conceived that what would surely be completely unacceptable in another context appears to obey the film’s own perverse set of rules with warmth and a refreshing lack of judgment.  

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The rules are those of the film’s lead protagonist, Sarah Jo (a phenomenal Kristine Froseth), a naive 26-year-old girl living with her unconventional mother Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her adoptive sister Traina (Taylour Paige) in a modest apartment in Los Angeles. There, the three women often sit about on the couch, talking freely about all kinds of topics. However, Sarah Jo, always beaming and attentive to what is being said, appears largely left out of her mother and sister’s candid chats about men, love, and sex. Wearing patterned dresses, pigtails and knee-high socks, she looks and behaves like a little girl, and to see her naively smiling at conversations that are often extremely explicit is more than a little alarming.

And yet “Sharp Stick” consistently manages to charm via the winning performances from its cast along with the filmmakers’ blissed-out style, which creates a relaxed rhythm that conceals a striking degree of control and confidence. Dunham’s talented cast members all play idiosyncratic characters in such a convincing and lived-in way that they never feel cynically engineered to get a rise out of the audience, though the film’s constant flirtation with sensitive subjects makes it tempting to jump to that conclusion.

The natural, organic quality of the characters is crucial when it comes to Sarah Jo’s scenes with Zach (Liam Michel Saux), a young child with an intellectual disability whom Sarah Jo looks after for laid-back playboy Josh (Jon Bernthal) and his very busy and very pregnant wife (Dunham). But it’s most important of all in the film’s pivotal, disturbing and impressive moment: While the jovial Josh is folding laundry, Sarah Jo uses a line on him that her mother swears helps a woman determine if a man really likes her or not: “Do you find me beautiful?”

Surprised by the question, Josh immediately apologizes for ever unintentionally leading the young girl on but pauses when the wide-eyed Sarah Jo explains why she is asking — and, in so doing, reveals the key to the film. Sarah Jo tells Josh that her reproductive organs were removed when she was a teenager due to an illness, and that, at 26, she feels it’s time for her to experience this thing called sex: the topic that so obsesses her mother and sister. When Josh reacts to this information with pity and agrees to do the deed right there and then on the laundry room floor, the moment is, of course, ethically thorny on several levels (she is his employee, he is married, his kid is sleeping in another room of the house).

But the frank and genuine exchange between the two lovers — along with Sarah Jo’s joy at finally experiencing something that was denied her for too long and the simple, funny, and tender way the frequently mythologized act unfolds — also makes the scene astonishingly beautiful and compassionate. Bernthal, in what might be the best performance of his career to date, excels at navigating the changing emotions and sexual charge of the scene.

The most disconcerting element in this sequence and the many other sex scenes that follow is Sarah Jo’s childlike appearance, which serves as an outside signifier of her naivete, her trust in other people, and her cluelessness about sex. Dunham discussed her own infertility in an essay published in 2020, and Sarah Jo could be perceived as Dunham’s vision of what it might mean to become a woman, without being granted the knowledge or experiences that typically coincide with fertility. Sarah Jo cannot have biological children, and yet she has also been denied the privilege of following through on her sexual desires, and experiencing sexual pleasure, up to this point. In fact, her caring manner with the young Zach, the ways in which she is always expected to help her sister make TikToks, and her generally attentive and accommodating nature all coincide to suggest that others, consciously or not, have taken advantage of her innate openness in order to cut her off from her own desires. In one scene, after discussing her own frequent and ever-renewing crushes with Sarah Jo, Traina asks her sister: “Can you even get those?”

Later in the film, after Josh abandons her, Sarah Jo concludes that she must have been rejected because she was not “good enough” at sex. That isn’t merely an endearingly naive idea; instead, Dunham uses it to suggest that young girls who grow up to be sexual women are too often led to confuse sentimental love with physical pleasure.

In another film, Sarah Jo might have fallen in love with a truly caring person, or found solace in a moving and revealing heart-to-heart with her mother in the third act. But in “Sharp Stick,” no one comes to “save” Sarah Jo (indeed, her family isn’t even aware that she’s lost her virginity). Instead, she decides to try and fix her issues on her own via a purely technical project: an experiment in which she samples all the sexual positions and practices she’s seen on porn websites (starting alphabetically with “anal) with men she meets on a hook-up app. But checking off every item on the unusual to-do list is not how Sarah Jo finally solves her problem. Ultimately, her belated coming-of-age journey is rendered as an awakening to the fact she’s been abandoned, and that she is now alone — alone, but at least able to experience orgasm. In Dunham’s film, sex is funny — but also a pleasure to be taken seriously. [A]

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