Sexual liberation is a difficult nut to crack. The world is full of repression, judgment, and plenty of people with bad intentions. It’s tough enough to muster the courage to even want to figure out who you are as a sexual being without the avalanche of obstacles life never stops throwing at you.

Writer/director Lena Dunham spends most of Sharp Stick exploring the life of an intensely sexually repressed adult. Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) is twenty-six, though her personality has a tendency to make her feel like a fourteen-year-old. She lives with her older sister Treina (Taylour Paige), an aspiring social media influencer, and mother Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an aging hippy whose own free-love attitude certainly hasn’t rubbed off on her younger daughter.

Sarah Jo endured a radical hysterectomy when she was fifteen, leaving stomach scars that make her quite self-conscious. The procedure left her with conflicted feelings toward her sexuality, remaining a virgin. Working as a caregiver for Heather (Lena Dunham) and Josh (Jon Bernthal), Sarah Jo decides one day that the laundry room is as good a place as any for her first time. The mild-mannered Josh initially rebuffs her, quickly succumbing to Sarah Jo’s wistful proposition.

Most of the film follows Sarah Jo’s efforts to learn more about sexuality, namely by trying every single activity under the sun. Bordering on sex addiction, her newfound hobby does little to diminish her otherwise innocent and naïve demeanor. Porn in particular provides an outlet for discovery that would be hard to find with married men or random bar patrons, finding a suitable muse in Vance Leroy (Scott Speedman).

Dunham doesn’t devote a lot of screen time toward developing her protagonist as a character, but Froseth delivers a welcoming performance that makes Sarah interesting enough to follow. The script is a disaster, full of pseudo-intellectual nonsense interlaced with Dunham’s penchant for shock value. The cringy dialogue leaves most of the actors with nothing to work with. Speedman is the only character who really hits a home run with Dunham’s writing.

The film is thematically all over the place, an 86-minute runtime that’s far too brief to really explore any of the many ideas on Dunham’s mind. There is some interesting commentary on the importance of self-exploration and body positivity, but the fleeting sincerity is often suffocated by scenes that don’t really add anything to the narrative. The story would probably work better as a limited series, but the characters aren’t really compelling enough to take on expanded arcs.

Sharp Stick has pieces of a good movie, the strong cast let down by a lackluster screenplay. Dunham’s technical work behind the camera has substantially improved in the twelve years since her last film. Froseth was the perfect actor for this film, but she just wasn’t given enough support to craft a satisfying experience.

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