Sarah Jo is a naive 26-year-old living on the fringes of Hollywood with her mother and sister. She just longs to be seen. When she begins an affair with her older employer, she is thrust into an education on sexuality, loss and power.... (Full plot summary below)
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Sarah Jo is a naive 26-year-old living on the fringes of Hollywood with her mother and sister. She just longs to be seen. When she begins an affair with her older employer, she is thrust into an education on sexuality, loss and power.
Leave your thoughts about Sharp Stick.
| The PlaylistElena LazicDunham has not lost her habit of exploring taboo and shocking scenarios. But just like this new film’s fluid, low key visual style and bright, poppy production design, the coming-of-age story it presents feels so organically conceived that what would surely be completely unacceptable in another context appears to obey the film’s own perverse set of rules with warmth and a refreshing lack of judgment. |
| RogerEbert.comTomris LafflyDunham unearths a refreshing amount of humor, honesty, and sincerity through Sarah Jo’s misadventures with Josh between bedsheets, at once challenging her complex (though not entirely unwarranted) reputation of being a tone-deaf and privileged one-trick pony, with her second-only feature. |
| Paste MagazineNatalia KeoganThe script is nowhere near as tight and the characters nowhere near as well-rounded as in Dunham’s previous efforts, yet this unpolished quality is what allows the film to exist in a realm of messiness that feels alluringly unfamiliar. In fact, the ideological murkiness of Sharp Stick is one of the most rewarding things about it. |
| TimeStephanie ZacharekThis is a film made with tenderness, more an exploration than a definitive statement, and a reminder that awkward sex isn’t necessarily bad sex: if anything, it’s the ultimate proof of our bewildering, imperfect humanness. |
| Vanity FairCassie da CostaSharp Stick is deeply personal; a series of constellation-like animations that arise in Sarah Jo’s mind as she has sex serve as a reminder of those resonances. Like any artist worth her salt, Dunham yields to the farthest corners of her imagination and experience—backlash be damned. |
| The Hollywood ReporterJourdain SearlesNone of it adds up to a coherent thesis on love or sex, but it doesn’t really need to. And there’s something thrilling about Dunham’s refusal to give her film a clear social intent. Much like Sarah Jo’s sexual dalliances, Sharp Stick is ultimately about the excitement of exploration. |
| The New YorkerRichard BrodyIn Sharp Stick, Dunham forces a flood of experience and pain into a compact vessel. |
| Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesThis pandemic-made feature teems with fertile ideas and observations – about social media, California Goopiness, reproductive trauma, feminist porn – that don’t always feel fully formed – more like purged – and her essential glibness undercuts the potential for real catharsis. |
| The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Chandler LevackAt its best points, Sharp Stick functions like a cinematic mixtape of every Taylor Swift song, presenting romantic clichés and immediately pulverizing them into dust. At its worst points, Sharp Stick is a twee, porn-ified Napoleon Dynamite, humiliating the very heroine who we should empathize with the most. |
| Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsWhat makes Dunham’s art worth watching is what makes so much of it feel like a gamble. It invites projection. |
