Sharp Stick
Directed by Lena Dunham
Running time: 1hr36 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Kristine Froseth in Sharp Stick
For someone who’s been such a pop culture fixture for the last decade or so — whether writing books, mouthing off on podcasts or simply getting people riled up with spicy interview quotes — Lena Dunham’s screen output has been smaller than you might think. It took her until this year to direct a second film to follow 2010’s name-making, decidedly influential mumblecore comedy Tiny Furniture; then, like the proverbial London buses, two came along at once. Her disarmingly odd YA romp Catherine Called Birdy came out in the autumn, but Sharp Stick, which premiered at Sundance in January and has oddly gone straight to VOD in the UK, is the major work: a spiky, exhilarating coming-of-age portrait that distils everything people find (delete as appropriate) exciting/aggravating/amusing/alienating/relatable/chaotic about her millennial feminist worldview in a brisk 90-minute package.
And yet it also finds Dunham, whose era-defining series Girls captured her own generational ennui with such precision, stepping smartly outside herself, and applying her interest in youthful, evolving sexuality and gender politics to Generation Z with empathy and wit. Not that its heroine Sarah Jo (an extraordinary Kristine Froseth) is typical of her peers, existing as she does between ages. A 26-year-old virgin whose sexual awakening was delayed by the trauma of a radical hysterectomy at 15, she’s both woman and naïf, misunderstood by her louchely bohemian mum (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her aspiring influencer sister (Taylour Paige), and perilously vulnerable to manipulation by the male objects of her eventual, delayed desires. In her job as a carer to special needs children, she displays the nurturing instincts that weren’t lavished on her as a girl; when the married, stay-at-home dad (Jon Bernthal) of one of her charges shows gentle interest in her, that escalates all too quickly into a sexual bond.
What follows is neither an ickily romanticised journey to womanhood nor a simplified #MeToo victim study. As you might expect from Dunham’s work, Sharp Stick celebrates erotic pleasure and liberation — pornography also gets a fair, non-shaming shake here — while also probing the thorny imbalances of power at play in this fragile relationship. It can be raucously funny, as any honest film about the visceral, often awkward activity of sex should be, and tender in the painful way of a deep-purple bruise: Dunham is interested in the crates of damage that everyone brings to their sex lives, whether they’re outwardly functional or not. Sarah Jo may gain further layers of trauma from losing her virginity, but she also makes progress toward overcoming her horror of her own body. Viewers can decide for themselves whether the exchange is worthwhile; Dunham, playful and provocative as ever, isn’t out to inspire agreement.
SHARP STICK (2022) Written by Lena Dunham | Shot by Ashley Connor | Edited by Catrin Hedström
Sharp Stick is now available on DVD and all major VOD platforms.