It’s been a good decade since Queer New Wave auteur Gregg Araki has directed a feature. Since his 2014 film “White Bird in a Blizzard,” Araki’s credits have largely been all ten episodes of the Starz limited series “Now Apocalypse,” a streaming-era extension of his obsessions with queerness, sex, and artistic notoriety. Ever since his renegade Teen Apocalypse trilogy in the 1990s—”Totally F*cked Up,” “The Doom Generation,” “Nowhere”—Araki has delighted in his bubblegum-colored, surrealistic, deeply erotic tales of queer people running headlong into their mess and daring the rest of the world to catch up. But with his latest, “I Want Your Sex,” Araki has made his most commercial film, and maybe his straightest(?), even as it’s still stuffed to the gills with the leather, whips, and whimsy that studs his more nihilistic projects.
Its opening frames offer a cute, gender-flipped switch on “Sunset Boulevard“: a woman lies naked, face down in a swimming pool, discovered by a befuddled young man bleeding from the nose and wearing frilly pink lingerie. Cut back to “9 1/2 weeks earlier,” and we learn the players in this absurd comitragedy: The woman is Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), a brassy, provocative, sex-positive conceptual artist of the kind that’s famous enough to have her own studio and her own cabal of nose-ring-wearing sycophants so willing to work with her they’ll chew gum for free just to stick it to a painted vagina on a canvas. One such intern is Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), the poor sap from the beginning, a charmingly befuddled young man in a sexless relationship with his disinterested, workaholic girlfriend (Charli XCX), who wants to work with Erika because he “loves [her] work.” “My earlier stuff or my later stuff?” She challenges. “Both, actually,” he lies.
He’s aimless and listless, as evidenced by his lack of momentum in his relationship or his artistic career (his major ambition? He might start a podcast). So naturally, he jumps at the chance when Erika seems to take interest in this malleable little boy toy and chooses to take her under his kinky wing. It’s not long before she’s inviting him to her office, forcing him to crawl, and bringing him back to her well-furnished house to engage in leather-clad play and a nice, lengthy stint in subspace. Elliot is the kind of sap who’s desperate to belong, to find approval; in Erika, he sees an outlet for his innermost desires, but it also mostly seems like he just wants someone to make him feel special. And in this case, he finds it while getting whipped, restrained, pegged, and made to wail about how much of a whore he is.
It’s a dynamic that invigorates Elliot, even as it threatens to send his life careening out of control. “You’re not the first, you won’t be the last,” Erika’s assistant and handler, played by Daveed Diggs, warns him. His best friend at the studio, a promiscuous gay man played by Mason Gooding, is also concerned for him, at least in the thirty-minute chunks he spares between hookups and orgies. (For a filmmaker so attuned to the complexities of the gay experience, Araki’s representation of queer characters here amounts largely to catty-queen jokes and Michael Hitchcock arriving at an art gallery wearing all leather while sipping champagne. “I’m gay, we practically invented nonmonogamy…and anal,” purrs Gooding in one scene. Yikes.)
Erika is one of Araki’s most fascinating characters, a bit of an avatar for Araki’s clear discomfort with Gen Z’s antipathy towards sex (an early convo ends in Erika handing Elliot Harold Robbins’s book Never Love a Stranger) and a cautionary tale for the kinds of abuse that people with power, regardless of sex, can get away with if they frame their transgressions as transgressive enough. Wilde plays her as an incredible mixture of Norma Desmond (the “Sunset” connection), Rita Hayworth’s Gilda, and Madonna at her peak; no taboo is too great for her to cross, even if it crosses past the ethics of employer-employee relationships (“that’s what made it so hot,” Elliot tells a pair of detectives, played with endearing sincerity by Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville) and the emotional care a dom should have for her sub.
Like “Pillion” earlier this year, it’s a dom-com that also recognizes the hurt and pain that comes from broken agreements and unhealthy kink dynamics. This one just does it with a bit more pop-art flair. (Both can be occasionally confused with endorsing their dom’s bad kink practices; at least “I Want Your Sex” turns it into a sick joke at its protagonist’s expense.)
Hoffman, for his part, is intensely adorable, to an extent that the sex in the film becomes more playfully comedic than downright erotic. Don’t get me wrong, he’s the kind of snack a certain person would absolutely go for—a thicc white boy with hand tattoos, a scraggly beard, a slutty little gold chain, and a wardrobe that includes thrifted button-down shirts from Waste Management. Like Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate,” his puppy-dog gormlessness is exactly what makes him so attractive, and also what makes him so sympathetic as Erika’s manipulations catch him increasingly off-guard. He’s so clearly not equipped for the relationship he’s been literally thrust into, from misreading Erika gigolo-ing him out to a French friend (Roxane Mesquida) who gets turned off by his crass forwardness to roping his bi-curious friend Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) into a disastrous attempt at a threesome at Erika’s insistence. “I Want Your Sex” delights in watching him squirm, even as we yearn for him to find his courage and stop getting roped into such a toxic dynamic.
But Araki’s poppy visuals and rat-a-tat dialogue keep the tone light, a move that both buoys the 90-minute picture while also glossing over the impact that Erika’s manipulations have on poor Elliot. In so doing, “I Want Your Sex” is torn between two worlds: one that recognizes that, yes, people should be getting weirder with it and being unashamed of their sexuality, but tries to hold space for the inequities that can occur when economic/artistic dominance and ideological self-righteousness get in the way. The latter doesn’t really have room to breathe in a picture that, at its heart, is meant to be light and effervescent; Araki feels like he’s pulling his punches for the sake of digestible studio comedy. To be fair, the comedy works—its limitations come when it tries to juggle those jokes with sex and power.
