Gregg Araki’s entire promotional campaign for his latest candy-coated slacker comedy has been focused on how Gen-Z is not having as much sex as Gen-X was at their age, a common online-discourse talking point you’ll hear echoed throughout the film itself. Araki will tell any interviewer who’ll listen about how kids these days aren’t fucking enough, that they’re robbing themselves of essential life experiences by being too socially timid during the most precious years of their sexual prime. Olivia Wilde acts as Araki’s Millennial mouthpiece for that complaint about the youth of today’s sexual cowardice in I Want Your Sex, while Cooper Hoffman acts as an ideological punching bag who has to suffer her blows, begging for forgiveness on behalf of his entire generation of anxious, undersexed dweebs. The only thing that saves this intergenerational dynamic from coming across as the “Old man yells at cloud” screed of a prurient 60-something curmudgeon is context & framing. Coming from Wilde’s onscreen persona as an art-scene dominatrix pushing her younger subordinate onto the mattress for a vigorous fuck session, Araki’s position shifts from a schoolhouse scolding to a form of negging dirty talk. It’s a way of teasing Gen-Z into having more sex with their elders in particular, not just each other, by turning that discourse into a degrading roleplay game all of its own — a playfully selfish maneuver.

Unfortunately, that kinky reframing of Gen-Z libido discourse is the only truly inspired idea in I Want Your Sex. The rest of the film swirling around it is just mildly naughty sitcom antics, with Cooper Hoffman playing Wyle E. Coyote to Olivia Wilde’s Roadrunner. Hoffman stars as a fresh-out-of-college slacker who’s openly groomed to become the next sexual plaything of his art-world celebrity boss, played by Wilde. Wilde pontificates through every conversation as if she’s always talking to press about her upcoming gallery show, exclusively communicating in platitudes about the philosophy, politics, and aesthetics of sex, which she’s built an entire career around commodifying in self-parodic pop art. The movie starts as a parody of Sunset Boulevard, with Wilde’s nude body floating face down in her own mansion’s swimming pool, which Hoffman’s befuddled underling has to explain to police detectives (Margaret Cho & Johnny Knoxville) in a classic noir flashback structure. Despite that tease of inevitable violence, the mood remains light & cartoony, to the point where even the S&M games between Wilde’s Norma Desmond dom and Hoffman’s Joe Gillis sub are too goofy to be taken seriously. Most of the kink in I Want Your Sex is comically gestured at instead of depicted in earnest. The seduction period where Hoffman is introduced to his boss’s dirty games is skipped entirely, with the edit jumping straight into depiction through montage rather than building genuine erotic tension scene to scene. The dialogue makes constant references to the act of pegging, but the only time a character straps on a harness onscreen is when they’re too drunk to figure out how it’s supposed to be worn. It’s a funny gag, but it’s also an indication that Araki may have lost some of his own sexually anarchic nerve as the decades have gone by. In his 90s indie days, he would’ve fully gone there instead of just talking about it.

For all of Araki’s preloaded discourse about the diminished returns of each generation’s sexual adventurism, the real story here is the diminished returns of each generation’s cinematic imagery. Araki recently gave an interview with GQ Magazine where he admitted that he vastly prefers the look & feel of digital cameras over the bulky analog film equipment of his early years, stating, “I love digital. I love the way it looks. I love the things you can do with it. I hate sprocket holes. I hate dealing with the labs.” It’s easy to see how that shift in format might’ve made Araki’s job easier & more fun, but he doesn’t seem to realize how detrimental it’s been to the overall quality of his work. I Want Your Sex‘s most pronounced visual idea is the contrast between the candy-colored pop art of Wilde’s art studio, the breakfast cereal commercial production design of Hoffman’s man-child apartment, and the grim, grey blandness of his checked-out girlfriend’s place, which is supposed to represent the sexless, passionless monotony of Gen-Z living (with Charli XCX playing its against-type spokeswoman). The problem is that, because it’s shot on digital cameras, there’s no richness or vibrancy to the colors in the more cartoonish spaces, and they end up looking a little bland as well, undercutting the point of the contrast. Some of the best touches of Araki classics like Nowhere & The Doom Generation are the absurd pops of color in the teenage fashion & interior decor, which is now being sacrificed for the convenience of digital filmmaking (an excuse that gets a little flimsy when you look at the high-contrast cartoon imagery of last year’s Araki-inspired, digitally shot Rats!). The unintended result is that I Want Your Sex often looks & feels like a straight-to-streaming comedy from an anonymous hack rather than the latest pop-art provocation from an indie cinema legend. Gregg Araki wants I Want Your Sex to read as a grand statement on the current moment in intergenerational sexual politics, but it instead mostly reads as a cute but inessential workplace comedy with a few more onscreen dildos than usual.

-Brandon Ledet