The year is 2026, all of the most popular right-wing influencers are proud virgins who love Hitler, and it’s up to a 66-year-old filmmaker to remind the young people of America that it’s OK to be horny. I don’t entirely understand how we got here, but I’m glad that Gregg Araki is doing something about it.The first movie he’s made since “White Bird in a Blizzard” was released 12 years ago, and the first movie he’s made that feels like a movie he’s made since the similarly garish but more entrancingly self-possessed “Kaboom” in 2010, “I Want Your Sex” is nothing less than a half-naked prayer for Gen Z to go out and — consensually! — fuck each other without fear of getting hurt. Not because they won’t get hurt (the film’s 23-year-old protagonist is introduced bleeding from every hole on his face while his naked boss floats face-down in a nearby pool), but rather because they almost definitely will. Because there’s something beautiful and necessary to being honest about what they really want, even if getting it proves complicated. “I Want Your Sex” pleads with its target demographic to transcend the psychic trauma of coming of age in an increasingly digital world where nobody feels safe being seen for who they are. To appreciate that taking risks, acting like a total fool, and otherwise making hilariously bad decisions in the pursuit of desire can be one of lust’s greatest rewards so long as people are willing to learn about themselves in the process. By couching that ethos in a funny but flaccid (and disappointingly tame) camp-lite satire of the art world, Araki and co-writer Karley Sciortino contend that sex is the most unimpeachable truth we have left at a time when everything else is malformed by lies and money. It’s no wonder that anti-woke Los Angeles artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde, having the time of her life as a self-described “pretentious whore from hell”) seems less interested in the substance of her work than she is in using it as an excuse to dominate her clueless male assistants. For one thing, her shitty art makes Jeff Koons look like Georgia O’Keefe, which helps to explain why it’s so lucrative. For another, her latest hire is an ideal plaything: A fresh-faced but rudderless people-pleaser who’s so afraid of getting in trouble that he’d cross any line Erika asked him to even if she wasn’t a radiant sex monster with alien cheekbones, an endless variety of latex power suits, and a tantalizing backstory that may or may not have involved fucking Vince Gallo at the New York premiere of “The Brown Bunny.”~this review continues on IndieWire~
