If you have Olivia Wilde wanting to play a nymphomaniac dominatrix by night, pretentious art world primadonna by day, that’s a go picture. That’s what Gregg Araki got in I Want Your Sex, his first feature in 12 years. Wilde’s naturally striking appearance is only accentuated when you dress her up in all sorts of latex, lingerie and art couture, both her business hours costumes and her after hours costumes. When you give her a persona that’s bitchy in the most empowering sense of that word, it just completes the picture. Further, when you give her a foil like Cooper Hoffman – a handsome enough schlub, but a schlub nonetheless – it has all the makings of both a great satire of the art world and a shrewd examination of the sexual hangups of today’s young people.

This description of I Want Your Sex is all set-up. There are some issues with the execution that prevent it from being the perfect realisation of everything it sets out to be, though it tries very hard to get there, and there are a lot of pleasures within that effort.

The film starts out with Wilde’s Erika Tracy wearing none of those outfits. In fact, she’s wearing nothing at all. In fact, she’s floating in a pool, Sunset Boulevard-style, in her birthday suit, and running to try to save her is Elliot Bell (Hoffman), who’s dressed in women’s undergarments and is bleeding profusely from the nose. The remainder of I Want Your Sex is going to break down how these two got to this point.

The result of a suspiciously cursory interview was that Elliot got a job as an assistant for Erika in her studio that makes the sort of art most people don’t understand but some people pay through the nose to acquire. Erika herself doesn’t understand it, or rather, thinks there’s nothing to understand – she openly acknowledges, at least to her underlings, that this is more or less a scam to put money in her bank account. Whatever the market will bear. Today’s example of this scam is that Elliot and other underlings, including the gay hunk Zap (Mason Gooding), are tasked with chewing countless pieces of gum, just enough to attach the pink blobs to an ever-growing three-dimensional vagina on a canvas.

A sore jaw is the worst of Elliot’s worries before Erika calls him into the office one day, telling Elliot she’s uncomfortable with the way Elliot has been undressing her with his eyes. Flummoxed and probably not actually guilty of that behaviour, Elliot stammers out an apology, only to find that Erika is testing the waters to see if Elliot might sleep with her. See, she’s got a proclivity for serving as a dom, and wants Elliot to be her sub, but is also available for some less structured hanky panky around the office. Elliot’s got a girlfriend, Minerva (Charli XCX), but she’s so disdainful of him, and so immersed in her med school studying at the expense of being present in his life, that he accepts the proposal without giving it the proper thought.

Needless to say, these are not the foundations for anything like a healthy relationship, and during the lead-up to Erika’s big show of her latest art, Elliot’s best friend Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), Erika’s second-in-command Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), and two confused detectives (Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho) are going to get caught in the crossfire.

Araki probably has not made enough recent films for most people to be familiar with a signature style, but dating back to films like Smiley Face and Kaboom, he does have a preference for on-screen fantasy cutaways and silly graphics and backgrounds. These get at the lively tone of the picture, which keeps it moving forward at a good clip. And the central performances by Wilde and Hoffman – Philip Seymour’s son, by the way – are both exactly what the script needs to keep up this momentum.

Overall, though, I Want Your Sex is a bit less than the sum of its parts. A movie pitched at this level should be funny, you would think, but Araki’s film exists more within the vicinity of funny, its absurdities rarely landing in a way that actually produces laughter. That’s only one of the goals of the movie, and in satires, laughing on the inside is usually good enough, or even what the movie is going for. However, the problem there is that these topics, while audacious on a surface level, are not breaking as much ground as they would seem to be breaking. Even if you aren’t immediately thinking of a dozen other movies that skewer the art world or BDSM, you’ve seen those movies, and I Want Your Sex, in some ways, is just adding another to the pile.

One of the things detracting from this movie is certain narrative choices it makes, certain failures to tie up loose ends, certain curious decisions about where to end the movie and on what note to leave us. Perhaps it is not quite as dark as a corpse floating in a pool would suggest, but that it uses these sort of Bugs Bunny/Road Runner cutaways certainly makes it seem like a lighter affair than it actually is. It’s like Araki has a tonne of good materials, and a cast basically to die for, but he doesn’t know how to bring it all together into something that lands in a satisfying fashion.

Maybe the surface pleasures are the point. It’s like Erika’s art. She’s utterly dismissive of the idea that it needs to mean anything, and prefers if it doesn’t, because it allows her to remain superior over it and laugh at the people she’s duping. It’s a way to extend her desire to dominate into the professional sphere. The trouble is, movie audiences usually require a bit more, and I Want Your Sex falls just short of providing that.

 

I Want Your Sex is currently playing in Australian cinemas.