Review: I Scream, You Scream, Gregg Araki Screams 'I Want Your Sex'

It’s been 14 years since New Queer Cinema and Gen-X icon Gregg Araki last made a movie—although in that time he did drop the too too brief but also too too sexy series Now Apocalypse on Starz, which you should most definitely seek out if you missed it. But because we deserve at least a couple of good things in a world flailing about with notsomuch, The Patron Saint of Queer Whatever has at last finally found his way back to us. Thank the alien overlords! This weekend gifts us with I Want Your Sex, an ever-horny ever-hilarious delightfully day-glo silly May-December dom-com that slaps Millennial sex hang-ups around (you know—consensually) with a big fat rubbery pink dildo. Just as the lord intended. Amen.

Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza, The Long Walk) plays Elliot, a clueless and confused but irredeemably adorable 23-year-old who manages to land a gig interning for the artistic erotica bon-vivant and Los Angeles demi-god Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), despite the fact that he seems kind of over his head just walking out of his house. (As it goes with most Araki leads.) But Elliot manages to land said gig even as he stutters and grins doofus-ishly through his entire interview—to his great benefit Erika barely looks up from her phone for most of it, telling him flatly at the end, followed by a hand-wave, that he’d already had the job before he’d even walked into the room.

Why and for what purposes we’ll only learn later—not so much later though, since Araki’s script playfully rearranges its continuity like a Valley Girl stirring haphazard Nilla chunks into her fruit smoothie. Just know the main cinematic totem Araki’s putting his twist on here is no less than Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Sunset Boulevard—the film opens with Erika’s dead body floating face-down in a swimming pool, followed by Elliot’s telling two police detectives (played by a slack-jawed Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville because of course—nobody casts their movies like Gregg Araki does, g’bless) of what led to that scene. Cue the flashbacks!!

And so, cutting back to the semi-beginning, most of Elliot’s interning consists of him and Erika’s rainbow of interns—which includes a deliciously indifferent trust-fund babe named Zap (Mason Gooding), who only seems to be there to waste the time between his Grindr hook-ups—sculpting a gigantic wall-mounted vagina out of chewing gum. And if ever there’s been a better metaphor for the intern experience I’ve yet to come across it. That is until one fateful afternoon a full week into his employment when Erika has her sneering right-hand-man Vikktor (Daveed Diggs) call Elliot into her office. Door open, of course!

Turns out she’s got a proposition for Elliot, and sure enough it fits exactly into the mold of “proposition” you’re thinking it might—she’s spotted a certain “aptitude for devotion” (to borrow a phrase from this year’s previous dom-com Pillion) in Elliot, and she would like to capitalize on that. By consensually humiliating him and screwing him senseless whenever the mood strikes her fancy. That big box of pink dildos in her apartment aren’t gonna peg themselves, after all. Cue aforementioned door closing!

I Want Your Sex doesn’t shy away from the thorniness of the power imbalances at play here—Erika is after all Elliot’s employer. It just understands that in certain circumstances, as long as everybody’s a willing participant, power imbalances can actually be really freaking hot to all parties involved. And hotness, it sometimes just overwhelms the senses. That’s Elliot’s perspective anyway, and he’s the one telling this story—as ever it’s not so simple; I did mention that dead body in the swimming pool already, so obviously somebody’s power-imbalance got the best of them, it seems. Araki’s more than happy to wade into the complicated briars of this conversation though, in ways that are simulatenously refreshing, fearless, and super goofy to boot. (More than anything it gives off big early-Almodovar vibes—think Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!… as if you ever stopped thinking Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!)

Araki got his start making sexually positive movies in an age where “positive” meant something else entirely though—in 1992 people hardly knew what to make of The Living End, his Bonnie & Clyde-esque crime-caper about two HIV-positive men that’s funny, furious, and sexy as hell all at once. He’s been swatting at Puritanism his entire career, and he’s hardly gonna let a recent swath of cinematic thinkpieces titled “Sex in Movies: What is it good for?” stop him. This is his food, his feast, and he regurgitates magic.

There’s admittedly a whiff of cringe in the few moments where Erika and Elliot have a too on-the-nose chats about these generational aberrations—maybe show more tell less in this instance, my man. But it also wouldn’t be a Gregg Araki joint if there wasn’t a stoned-out degree of woodenness to the proceedings too—it’s always been part of Araki’s cinematic charm, and maybe you either vibe with that or you don’t. Early on, as Charli XCX’s literally animated bosoms pop out and bounce around (she plays Elliot’s dementedly distracted girlfriend), you must then make your choice—strap on or get off. (That could actually be Erika’s own motto, come to think of it.)

Still even if the man who once taught this critic as a woefully clueless teenager what “cool” was is now identifying more with the adults in the room than he is with the kids that he’s been documenting his entire career, that doesn’t make him totes out-of-touch just yet—seems like the same kids have been discovering his classics thanks to that recent (and long long begged for) Criterion box-set of his “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy. And I Want You Sex shows it’s been a two-way reciprocal street—a generational sixty-niner, if you will. Araki is as ever open for any and everything, and this movie is his fizzy love-affair bridging all ages, genders, kinks and consensual obligations.

Olivia Wilde, who’s having a banger of a year between this and the tremendously funny The Invite, basically steals the entire film, but how could she not with a role as catty and red-hot as this? She’s a domination fantasy sprung to terrible larger-than-life, dragging all innocence and innocents into her tornado of bad art and badder bondage. Elliot might be a mark, but we’re marked right alongside him. Butt-branded cuck-boys begging for more. Even Elliot’s sweet roommate Apple (a really wonderful and charming Chase Sui Wonders) can’t resist when the siren’s cat-call comes a’callin.

As I Want Your Sex spins more and more off into third-act ridiculousness—you half expect Araki’s beloved lizard-aliens to make a cameo, perhaps orgy-adjacent this go—it weirdly starts to feel like the perfect companion piece to his 2007 stoner-masterpiece Smiley Face. (And speaking of Charli XCX, she cited that film as an inspiration for a certain phenomenon of her own called Brat, proving the multi-generational whirlpool just keeps sucking.) It’s all a load of pop-art nonsense baked out of its brain, monologuing about late-stage capitalism in half-hallucinated jibber-jabber as it slaps your ass—sounds like heaven. So it’s best if you just lay back in your little frilly pink panties and enjoy the crazy ride. Gregg Araki—he still gives the best!