'No Hard Feelings' review: Jennifer Lawrence elevates teen sex comedy

There's humor and heart in "No Hard Feelings," an R-rated sex comedy that has more on its mind than just titillation.

The movie is positioned as a bawdy romp about a kid losing his virginity before he goes off to college. But it's more than that, and it becomes a double coming-of-age story that is enriched by the performances of — and the winning chemistry between — its two leads.

That's Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence as Maddie, a 32-year-old Long Islander whose life is stuck in neutral, and breakout Andrew Barth Feldman as a socially awkward Princeton-bound 19-year-old who is having trouble finding his place in the real world, removed from phones and screens. "Good Boys" writer-director Gene Stupnitsky connects these two wandering souls, and while the mechanics of their meet-up don't always add up, Lawrence and Feldman push forward and find the truth in their characters.

As the film opens, Lawrence's Maddie is in a bind. She's got a pile of past due bills stacking up and her car is repossessed, a problem since when she's not serving drinks at the local beachside bar, she's making ends meet as an Uber driver. She's trying to save her Montauk home, left to her after the death of her mother, and she's resentful of the rich Manhattanites who are pushing locals like herself out of her hometown.

She's also painted as a flighty romantic partner who is either afraid of commitment or unwilling to settle. So she's a prime candidate when she spots an online ad from two parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) who are offering up a free Buick Regal to someone willing to date their child, Percy (Feldman), and help get him out of his shell. The parameters and specifics of their transaction are best left unscrutinized, but the wheels are in motion, and the vivacious, sexually free Maddie is on a collision course with the shy, inward Percy. Let the games begin.

Except the games are only the beginning of "No Hard Feelings," which on the teen sex spectrum has more in common with "Risky Business" than "American Pie." Beyond the shenanigans, which include a fully nude Lawrence battling three pranksters on a beach, a warmth develops between Maddie and Percy that elevates the film above its somewhat routine conventions.

And Stupnitsky's script, which he co-authored with John Phillips ("Dirty Grandpa"), goes well beyond the bedroom to look at generational behaviors and norms, not only to point out Gen-Z's apprehensions about the world around them, but the ways that their helicoptering late Boomer parents helped foster and intensify those fears. Lawrence's Maddie is the millennial caught between them, and her casual flippancy makes her a target for the Zoomer phone police, who look to expose her online during a house party gone awry.

These larger threads are touched upon, even if they're not totally followed through, and a handful of shoddy sequences — two involving wrecking vehicles — chip away at the reality of the the world the film presents. But Lawrence and Feldman are there to ground it, and one genuinely great sequence involves Percy singing a stripped-down version of Hall & Oates' "Maneater" on piano in the middle of a fancy restaurant. It's touching in ways you wouldn't expect and falls in line with the characters' growth at that point in the film, and you might never hear the song the same way again.

That's the strength of "No Hard Feelings": it takes something you've experienced many times before and puts a fresh spin on it through its characters and perspective. And it shows that no matter what point we're at in life, we all could stand to do a little growing up.

agraham@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @grahamorama

'No Hard Feelings'

GRADE: B

Rated R: for sexual content, language, some graphic nudity and brief drug use

Running time: 103 minutes

In theaters