Still like that old-time rom com roll? The modern teen sex comedy, a cruder version of the romantic comedy, was forged in the crucible of Risky Business from ingredients that would become quite familiar: stealing a car, throwing a party you shouldn’t be throwing, losing your virginity. It may be easy to remember the first one you saw, not so easy the last. In increasingly woke times, it’s becoming an increasingly dead form.

No Hard Feelings gives us a 2023 entry into the genre, with a twist: Instead of being told from the perspective of Tom Cruise’s Joel, it’s through the eyes of Rebecca De Mornay’s Lana – the prostitute. No, Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) is not actually a sex worker, but she temporarily imitates one because she needs a new car. She answers an ad posted by the parents of Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), who want her to date their son before he leaves for university, to bring him out of his shell and prepare him to be a normally functioning social creature on campus. (They’re played by teen comedy vet Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti, both great in small roles.) The word “date” is in inverted commas, and it would have to be considering what they’re offering as compensation: a Buick with only 30,000 miles on it.

It’s the perfect mildly absurd setup for a sex comedy. Of course, Maddie is not merely covetous of a Buick, specifically not a Buick as that’s sort of considered an old person’s car, sometimes mistaken for a boat. The money she’s making bartending in her hometown of Montauk, on the tip of Long Island, is not cutting it, and she used to supplement it with hours logged as an Uber driver. But her car has been towed for non-payment – by a spurned ex-boyfriend (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) no less – and she’s got an even bigger possession she can’t afford to lose. The bank is going to foreclose on her house if she can’t make a payment to them, and it was the house she grew up in, recently bequeathed to her when her mother died.

Percy, for his part, is afraid of the world. He works in a dog rescue shelter, but he gets there on his bike (he never got his driver’s license) and is constantly on the lookout for germs or other threats to his personal safety and well-being. He’s so far inside that shell that it seems impossible for Maddie to lure him out of it, even showing plenty of cleavage and leg, and throwing herself at him like a rapacious cougar. Maddie is only 32, but the ad wanted someone in their early to mid 20s. It’s one of many deceptions she’s got to keep straight, as Percy can never know her interest in him is anything but genuine.

If you’ve consumed these ingredients before, you know more or less what Gene Stupnitsky’s film will do with them. The surprises are not so much in the narrative structure as they are in the details. One example is how these events are shoehorned into the third decade of the 21^st century. At one point, Maddie follows a disillusioned Percy to a party, and two a-holes start picking on her rather than Percy, focusing on her advanced age. When she tells the guys to go get it on with each other, instead of being offended at the suggestion they are gay, as they would have once been, they are offended that she considers this an insult. Half a dozen people begin filming her to see how else she may cancel herself.

At the same party, the actual owners of the house, the parents, emerge when they think Maddie might be recklessly endangering Percy. They’re not shocked that the party is happening, they’re shocked that Maddie assumes their child would throw a party without their endorsement.

If we live in such a different age now, can we still enjoy a movie like this? The answer is most assuredly “yes,” though some of the ways No Hard Feelings tries to get there feel dated in their approach. For one, every attempt at broad comedy fails to land to the extent that it should, though it would be hard not to laugh at the scene where the recently skinny dipping Maddie kicks the asses of the teenagers who steal their clothes – while still fully nude. Yes there’s nudity in this film, but it doesn’t occur in the context of a sex scene, which is the kind of change Stupnitsky et al employ to skirt some of the issues that got these movies in trouble in the first place.

As may be indicated from the previous scene, Lawrence is fully committed here. It’s a new sort of role for her as she transitions from playing primarily younger characters, and perhaps the most naked symbol – sorry – of her return to prominence after a few years of self-enforced quiet. It’s not the nudity that is new for her, but the embrace of a full-on comedy. She’s more than game for it, which doesn’t prevent the script from sometimes letting her down and leaving her more exposed, so to speak, than we might like.

Feldman is also engaging in his first major role, a gawky teen straight out of central casting. He easily makes us feel the extent of the betrayal we know Maddie is practising on him, though of course she’s started to feel real feelings toward him as per the format. Whether it’s the script or the performance, though, there comes a point when he strikes us as far more savvy than a kid who primarily socialises online should be by this point in his albeit fast-tracked maturation. We know he’s got the book smarts, since he’s going to Princeton, but the street smarts develop quickly enough that they seem like they were there all along – in which case, did he really even need any of this in the first place.

Nitpick if you will – I realise it’s me doing the nitpicking, not you – but No Hard Feelings does give you the feels by the end, even if you see the exact shape and form of that end coming mid-way through the first act. No one ever said a teen sex comedy was supposed to surprise you. The surprises have always come in the form of the outlandish set pieces involving too much alcohol, the police, and in this case, more than one scene of a character riding on the hood of a car — another probably intentional nod to Risky Business. Those scenes may not surprise by busting your gut, but the whole movie surprises by existing at all, and it’s worth throwing this one a slightly generous rating just so Hollywood will give us more of them in the future.

 

No Hard Feelings is currently playing in cinemas.