I Want Your Sex opens to the sound of whimpering suggestive of incoming orgasm. But when we finally see twenty-something Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), he is not in the throes of pleasure. Instead, he is running around a big, artsy house sporting only pink lingerie and a busted lip, trying to piece together why there is a lifeless body in the swimming pool. (This year’s Wuthering Heights opened with the same type of audio gag, where the sounds of presumed pleasure are revealed to be those of a dying man. I find this statement to be tedious. “Pleasure and pain are closer than we think,” is not a novel enough sentiment to open a film).
The opening act of I Want Your Sex is similarly dry. Elliot is an underpaid, slightly-neurotic Gen Z art school student. His new boss is the severe, blonde, hypersexual celebrity artist Erica Tracy (Olivia Wilde). Elliot is tasked with artist assistant chores like chewing on gum to be amassed into the shape of vagina with the rest of Erica’s underpaid assistants. In Erica and Elliot’s first one-on-one meeting, there is a mild Secretary pastiche — invasive questions from a cool, collected boss to a bumbling, jobless youth. But the domineering prodding and subsequent sexual proposition lacks the invasive cerebral spurring that is so deliciously squirmy between that film’s Lee Holloway and Mr. Grey. Instead, Erica mostly wants to complain about the fact that she can’t say dick anymore…because of woke! (Director Gregg Araki says that Erica’s occasional tirades against Gen Z sexless hysteria reflect his own feelings.)
Consequently, I remained skeptical throughout I Want Your Sex’s first twenty minutes. I am a lover of BDSM films, which means that I know all too well how easy they are to mess up. Stories about kink are particularly prone to overpoliticization, overexplanation, and — crucially — a lack of fun in the hopes of appealing to the vanilla masses.
Fortunately, my fears were unwarranted. I Want Your Sex gets almost all of its naughty (read as: boring) behavior out of the way relatively quickly. As soon as Erica and Elliot begin their dom/sub arrangement, the film finds its footing. The solid foundation of nearly every BDSM movie I enjoy (or at least find watchable) is the expectation that the audience can handle the sexual subversion without hand-holding. Erica calls Elliot her sub in passing without tacking on a definition or holding for presumed shock and awe from the audience. There is neither an overuse nor a void of lingo, and the sexual interactions between the two leads are varied and believable. The performance of kink — down to Elliot’s guileless, pouty lap-sitting in Erica’s big office — feels candy-coated and daydreamy, but true to the actual practice of dominance and submission.
The accuracy of both the feeling of the dynamic and the solid development of the characters themselves is due in no small part to the talents and experiences of screenwriter Karley Sciortino. Sciortino’s 2018 memoir Slutever details her time as a young person fucking older people in positions of power (some of I Want Your Sex’s escapades, including Erica sending Elliot to bed one of her friends, are ripped directly from chapters of Slutever) before turning to Sciortino’s time as a pro-dominatrix — a personal wellspring that solidifies Erica’s believable dominant persona. The further I Want Your Sex progresses, the more it appears that Sciortino is offering a pleasantly Frankensteined adaptation of her own memoir.
This tonal clarity is further buoyed by strong performances from Hoffman and Wilde. Hoffman seems to have charged his doe-eyes and messy red hair under the power of the full moon for this film. At first sexually frustrated (and, in a stereotypical Gen Z manner, able to buzzword his way through justifying his own blue balls), Elliot becomes cuter with every step he takes into becoming a lip-biting, (sometimes literal) puppy-dog submissive. Wilde plays Erica’s three shifting personas: cocksure public figure, embodied dominant, and brittle private woman, with a grounded surefootedness. But where I Want Your Sex skillfully portrays Elliot and Erica as both distinct characters and sexually-interlocked opponents, it finds everyone else irrelevant and uninteresting. Every other character is painted with enormously broad strokes — there’s a frigid disposable girlfriend played by Charli xcx doing a maybe-kind-of-accent, a Tumblr-styled Zillennial roommate named Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), and a nonmonogamous, bitchy gay bestie named Zap (Mason Gooding). None of these characters are offensive in their caricatureing, but time with them feels like time wasted when it could otherwise be spent with the infinitely more interesting Erica and Elliot.
Intercut between the rise and fall of Erica and Elliot’s kinky romance is an interrogation room plotline, where Elliot is grilled by two detectives (played by Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho) about his and Erica’s arrangement. This interrogation plotline feels like a playful ribbing of Araki’s understanding of Gen Z’s supposed fear of sex and dating. What would it even look like to get “in trouble” for having sex as a consenting adult? What are we scared of when we decide to hide from pleasure out of anxiety? I Want Your Sex seems to think the kids are not alright: undersexed, risk-averse, handwringing, and in desperate need of some sociosexual subversion. It’s nice to imagine, as I Want Your Sex does, that the best medicine could be as simple as letting a hot older woman stomp the skittishness out of us.
