If you haven’t heard, Gen Z isn’t getting laid. Sex — who’s having it, and more importantly, who’s not — is paramount in Gregg Araki’s return to the big screen, marking an end to a 12-year stint of cinematic celibacy for the director. Araki emerged as a masthead of punk and queer cinema in the ’90s; with his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy, he crafted a world in which burnouts and Valley girls rally through the gutters of a late-capitalist patriarchy, surviving on a diet of cigarette butts and bon mots. His movies carved a haven for queer kids, weirdos, and anyone who’s ever felt left out or pissed off with our heteronormative, aggro America. But a lot’s changed since Araki first made his mark. With I Want Your Sex, the punk provocateur proves he’s been paying attention.
Eliot (Cooper Hoffman) is a hopelessly straight and sexless Zillennial with little direction beyond where he might score next. It’s not that he’s single: he’s got a gorgeous girlfriend, Minerva (Charli xcx), but she’s too wound up in her neuropharmacology studies to care about their relationship. But a dead sex life isn’t Eliot’s only problem. He’s unemployed, and his roommate, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), is getting tired of footing his rent. So, when Eliot lands a job as an assistant for the sex-forward, transgressive artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), it seems he’s killed two birds with one stone — unless there really can be too much of a good thing.
I Want Your Sex trades the 16 mm grit of Araki’s early work for a bombastic palette of Looney Tunes brightness: the studios, apartments, and clubs Erika and Eliot fuck their way through bleed with dayglo fluorescence. It’s the world as Erika sees it. With Erika, Wilde continues a fully mounted comeback year after the debacle of Don’t Worry Darling, maturing the sexual handwringing in her excellent The Invite into a full-blown HR nightmare. Erika quickly contracts Eliot into a BDSM-flavored affair that inches over the bleeding edge of consent; she wields scissors, blades, lube, and dildos with the panache of an X-rated Bugs Bunny. As in The Invite, Wilde proves herself a formidable comic actress, matching Araki’s trademark acerbic one-liners with a slick command of her own physicality. It’s thrilling to watch her pin Eliot with the precision of a cenobite, drawing and quartering him over the boundaries of pleasure and pain.
“I’m a slave to this vagina,” says Eliot as he joins his fellow artist’s assistants in filling an outline of Erika’s vulva with chewing gum for an upcoming show. Erika’s and Eliot’s romance, as Erika begrudgingly admits, is in firm violation of the “woke police.” It’s also a vehicle for Araki’s own lamentations of a sexless generation, and the dialogues he crafts (with cowriter Karly Sciortino) often function as a live exploration of why the new crop stopped fucking. Critically, Araki’s creed is never delivered as a condemnation. It’s easy to dismiss the peccadilloes of perpetually younger faces as the ills of a broken system, to shout at the clouds over the decaying quality of the human experience. But The Doom Generation director, now 62, has described I Want Your Sex as a “sex-positive love letter to Gen Z.” He’s careful to equip Eliot with considered rebuttals to Erika’s hedonistic rebukes of Kids These Days, approaching the death of boning with a gentle, optimistic curiosity. Araki isn’t mad, he’s just disappointed.
I Want Your Sex is every bit as witty and hilarious as Araki’s most enduring work, but his provocations have softened — they often don’t register as a priority. For all of Erika’s basic-cable breaking dresses (stunning victories from costume designers Ari Phillips and Monica Chamberlain) and libertine sexual demands, little of I Want Your Sex feels shocking. At times, the movie can even feel chaste. That’s not to say Araki has lost his edge; his latest work is replete with cum shots on Madonna shirts, animated bouncing breasts, and queer invasions of a straight, American liturgy. But the anger that categorized New Queer Cinema pillars like Nowhere has simmered to a slow boil. Dedicated fans may miss the Ministry needle drops and bloody-nosed vinegar that punctuated Araki’s classics; the director seems more concerned with finding a sustainable way to survive a changing, hostile world.
“I think my peers have not been well served,” Eliot tells Erika as she grills him over his sexless milieu, “[by] growing up in a time where nothing feels safe.” As Eliot, Cooper Hoffman emerges as a champion of I Want Your Sex’s commitment to empathy. He is boyish and goofy, soft and sweet, and a testament to Araki’s endeavor to connect the renegade sexual politics of his own youth to a new set of kids burdened by an endlessly complicated, unnavigable modern American life. I Want Your Sex’s most shocking element isn’t its gaudy orgies or playful middle fingers toward retrosexual negativity. It’s Araki’s admission that the world has changed under his feet, and that he’s ill-equipped to figure it out on his own this time.
DIRECTOR: Gregg Araki; CAST: Cooper Hoffman, Olivia Wilde, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Daveed Diggs; DISTRIBUTOR: Magnolia Pictures; IN THEATERS: July 31; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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