Sharp Stick, Lena Dunham’s first project at the creative helm since the ending of her quite wonderful HBO series Girls some five years ago, retains the same basic style as the show while making some important modifications. (Dunham has been involved as an executive producer on a couple of series for the esteemed cable channel since her flagship, but they were false-starts.) The new film still turns its focus to an interconnected group of people within a rarefied social class but this time we’re in Los Angeles, not Brooklyn. Here, Dunham has also made the smart casting move of decentering herself. She’s a compelling onscreen presence, but it was time to mix things up after she was the main character of both her feature debut and all six seasons of Girls, and a supporting role in her new film suits her just fine.
In Sharp Stick, Kristine Froseth plays Sarah Jo, a seemingly growth-stunted, naive woman who lives with her space cadet mother, Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and somewhat more grounded sister Treina (Taylour Paige). Froseth has a good heart, which is communicated by the fact that she spends her days volunteering as a support figure in the home of a child with Down syndrome, Zach (Liam Michel Saux), whose parents, Josh (Jon Bernthal) and Heather (Dunham), are in need of help for some ill-defined reason. Soon enough, the inexperienced Sarah Jo takes inspiration from the sexual escapades her sister details in frank conversation between mother and daughters and makes a pass at Josh, which he can’t resist. What evolves from there alerts the woman to parts of the world and herself of which she had been repressing or ignorant, causing a kind of new identity to blossom.
Josh, though significantly older than the 26-year-old Sarah Jo, is about as juvenile, so the brief, clumsy but incendiary interest between the two makes some twisted sense. That Dunham, who both wrote and directed the movie, doesn’t feel the need to protract Josh and Heather’s involvement in Mary Jo’s life and the narrative of the film, only following them for as long as their impact on her is relevant, is to the film’s credit.
Mary Jo’s exaggerated innocence, the non-West-Hollywood L.A. setting and the askew family dynamics inevitably bring to mind Miranda July’s excellent 2020 film Kajillionaire. And while Sharp Stick doesn’t work as well on the level of absurdist comedy as July’s film, with several of its attempts at characters blurting out quirky asides falling flat, Dunham’s movie arguably creates a more believable context and organic trajectory for its lead character than Evan Rachel Wood’s character in Kajillionaire. The latter film’s Old Dolio, though delightful, never quite broke out of her neat conception on the page. Sarah Jo, despite initially being even more precious and preposterous a creation with her infantilized wardrobe of scrunchies, raised ponytails and long, billowing skirts, ends up feeling fairly natural and human.
Some of the lines Dunham gives the women in her cast—Leigh and Froseth especially—can feel ill-conceived or cringe-inducing, and not for the right reasons. It simply plays like she hasn’t quite refined these women to their essence, or perhaps refuses to. Her writing fares better with the film’s men, particularly Bernthal, whose performance and character perfectly captures the weak, pathetic ways that men can repeatedly fail the people in their lives and go on endless, self-pitying apology tours to atone for their mistakes. The way Bernthal and other male characters in the film are written simply feels more bracing and no-holds-barred and one often wishes this was the approach for the entire cast. Scott Speedman is, however, gifted a terrific showcase as a porn star named Vance Leroy, who we only see secondhand through videos on Sarah Jo’s laptop but who nonetheless makes his goofy, idiosyncratic mark on the film.
The notion of proximity and who the audience sees up close is of keen interest to Dunham throughout Sharp Stick. It’s part of how she slowly doles out character information and is echoed in the photographic choices from DP Ashley Connor (who also shot a couple of early Josephine Decker films, including Madeline’s Madeline). We’re kept at arm’s length from several characters, particularly Dunham’s Heather, for much of the movie in a manner that feels instructive and illustrative of certain characters’ tendencies to distance. The cuts from medium and wide-angle shots to close-ups almost always has an intentional and gratifying power in the film and proves tied to Mary Jo’s evolution as a person.
Sharp Stick could be dinged for not resolving all of its thematic threads or finishing all of the conversations it starts, such as a running undercurrent that lightly prods at the white gaze toward Black people and art. But it also deserves some praise for limiting its scope to a set timeframe within a person’s life and ending the movie, in a rather realistic fashion, before all of her problems are fixed and crises averted. Like many aspects of Dunham’s second film, this is a two-sided dilemma, a strength and a weakness wrapped up in one conflicted character study.
Photo courtesy of Utopia
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