Thank Goodness for Jennifer Lawrence’s R-Rated Rom-Com
No Hard Feelings is more sweet than sexy—and that’s okay.
Jennifer Lawrence should have starred in an R-rated comedy long ago. She’s practically auditioned for one her entire career, on daytime shows and in late-night appearances where she displayed a freewheeling, uninhibited demeanor that made her a household name. She drank with talk-show hosts. She told bawdy anecdotes. She claimed she could recite all of Dumb and Dumber, Anchorman, and Step Brothers. A YouTube compilation of her off-the-cuff moments in interviews—labeled “Jennifer Lawrence funniest moments ever (MUST WATCH)”—has garnered 10 million views.
Thank goodness for No Hard Feelings, in which Lawrence looks like she’s having the most fun she’s ever had on-screen, finally releasing the pent-up screwball energy she’s never been able to fully channel into her characters before. In the film, now in theaters, she plays Maddie, a 32-year-old, down-on-her-luck Uber driver in Montauk, New York. After her car is towed, she responds to a Craigslist ad posted by a wealthy couple seeking a young woman to date their shy 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), and take his virginity before he heads to college. Her reward? A used Buick. The setup is a bit contrived, seemingly positioning the movie as a raunchy studio romp that’ll help Hollywood return to its American Pie glory days. But the resulting film is more goofy and sweet than obscene. No Hard Feelings is not about to usher in a new era in mainstream sex comedies—it is, however, a delightful showcase for Lawrence’s movie-star verve.
For one thing, Lawrence is gifted at physical comedy. When she dons Rollerblades to skate across town, she moves with the intense determination of an Olympian. When, still in Rollerblades, she tries to steal her car back from a parking lot, she skids and flops and twists as if she’s lost her bones. When she attempts to seduce Percy by going skinny-dipping, only for their clothes to be snatched by a group of bullies, she storms out of the water, buck naked, and beats them up like a very blond, very tan Hulk. It’s an over-the-top, overcommitted performance that never feels like caricature, in part because Lawrence imbues Maddie with a pained righteousness. Maddie relishes being an agent of chaos, but Lawrence doesn’t play her as heartless; she’s only desperate to stay in Montauk and maintain the home her mother left her. If that requires sleeping with a soon-to-be college student for a Buick, so be it.
Except No Hard Feelings refuses to ever get that explicit, peppering its dialogue with plenty of sex jokes but largely shying away from actual sexual encounters. Maddie bares her soul more frequently than she does her skin, transforming the story, through Lawrence and Feldman’s jagged chemistry, into a rather tender depiction of an unusual friendship. Though at times I wished the film took more risks with its humor, I appreciated how both characters subvert the stereotypes of sex comedies past: Maddie is no mindless bimbo, and Percy is no milquetoast nerd. The film also surrounds them with cartoonish characters and scenarios—the Saturday Night Live alum Kyle Mooney pops up as a male nanny, and at one point, Maddie has to fend off a group of Gen Zers filming her at their high-school party—injecting the film with a dose of absurdity that keeps Maddie and Percy’s relationship from becoming too syrupy.
Like the Risky Business copycats and hot-girl-meets-dweeby-dude romantic comedies that thrived in the aughts and early 2010s, No Hard Feelings offers some insight into the role that sex plays in the coming-of-age process, and how a perceived pressure to lose your virginity by some arbitrary deadline can remain a cross-generational burden. The film explores the difficulties of growing up, whether at 19 or 32, and the ways in which Maddie’s and Percy’s attitudes toward sex invite judgment about their levels of maturity. In some ways, it’s a referendum on the value of raunch itself. Percy never seems that interested in losing his virginity to Maddie; her double entendres and seduction techniques just scare him. And when the film does get lewd, such scenes are in stark contrast to the tranquil beachside backdrop. Of course, No Hard Feelings isn’t trying too hard to make a point, moving merrily along as it forgoes filthy jokes in favor of good-humored affection. More than anything, it’s an excellent vehicle for Lawrence to flex her comic muscles—something I hope she’ll attempt again before long.
