Kritiken

There’s a sweet centre to the latest film from Lena Dunham, which though it strains at the bounds of believability in terms of its set-up, nevertheless has a refreshingly up front approach and a lack of cynicism when it comes to its central character’s self-schooled sexual awakening.

It’s not entirely clear what we’re meant to make of Dunham’s film, which reads like a cri de coeur one moment and a boldly bawdy comedy of manners the next. Uneven, ambiguous and unnerving, “Sharp Stick” undoubtedly has a point to make. What that is, precisely, might be subject to debate.

It is a study of women’s sexuality, desire and autonomy that succeeds just as much as it stumbles, a method of feminist storytelling that privileges the pursuit of desire over an evenness of narrative. It cares not for the customary but instead for the messiness of real life, which here is inextricable from its own means.

Sharp Stick is less a movie than a symptom, a tangle of would-be feminist ideas that, let us hope, needed to be gotten out of its creator’s system so she could get back to making something good.

[I]t’s hard not to admire the wrongness of Dunham’s impulses, just because so few would be willing to follow them. And yet the film bumps smack into real insights along the way about how young women can have a tenuous grasp on their self-worth, and how sex can act as a tricky barometer for it.

“Sharp Stick,” [is] an uneven, uneasy fable of desire by the writer, director and performer Lena Dunham,

Every moment is awkward, phony, excruciating, and just so unbelievably bad.

While Sharp Stick is only a lightly amusing mess, it’s still welcome to see Dunham return with a film just bold enough to confirm that she remains “a” distinct voice of “a” generation.

Sharp Stick is nothing short of singular. If it’s unlikely the film will gain the director any new fans, it represents another step into bold territory—even as quality dips and swerves, this is a project where it seems no notes were given, the kind of freedom that’s refreshing in today’s landscape.

Although she is a fairly inscrutable figure, and Dunham’s script never quite arrives at a larger point, these sexual misadventures are full of frankness and humor.

Sharp Stick’s narrative flows in strange ways, ultimately moving far past the confines of the Bernthal/Dunham household and venturing out into a porn-fueled cosmic odyssey... these plot leaps are more ambitious than elegant, but Sharp Stick’s cast does their best to keep up...

It’s easy to assume that the story is meant to only approximate the real—exploring the sexual coming-of-age of a woman who’s a little too old to be coming of age—but it is both earnest and facetious, rooted in the bizzaro LA pastime of taking oneself seriously while being absolutely ridiculous.