103 min | R | June 23, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
A broke Montauk townie answers a Craigslist ad from rich parents who want her to date their sheltered son out of his shell before he leaves for college. The pay is a car. Jennifer Lawrence commits so hard she almost makes a tame premise feel dangerous.
Maddie Barker is a Montauk townie about to lose her late mother’s house to back taxes. She drives for a rideshare app until her car gets repossessed. A pair of wealthy helicopter parents post a Craigslist ad looking for someone to date their shy nineteen-year-old son before he leaves for Princeton. They will pay with a car. Maddie takes the job. The film dresses itself as a raunchy sex comedy, but it is really about a working-class woman getting priced out of the town she grew up in by the same rich families who hire her.
Jennifer Lawrence plays Maddie with total physical commitment and no vanity. She brawls naked on a beach with teenagers who steal her clothes, and she plays it as fury rather than titillation. Andrew Barth Feldman plays Percy as a sheltered theater kid whose anxiety reads as genuine rather than cute. The two build a friendship that the script keeps threatening to soften into sentiment. Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti play Laird and Allison Becker with the oblivious entitlement of parents who outsource their son’s adolescence. Natalie Morales grounds the supporting cast as Sara, the friend who keeps telling Maddie the obvious truth.
Gene Stupnitsky directs from a script he wrote with John Phillips. He shoots the naked beach fight in a static wide and lets the violence play in full, which strips the scene of leering and turns it into slapstick. The Montauk light gives the film a postcard prettiness that the script uses against itself, framing the summer paradise as a place Maddie can no longer afford. Percy’s piano cover of Hall and Oates’ “Maneater” becomes the best set piece, shifting from joke to genuine ache as Feldman sings to a barroom that finally pays attention. The comedy and the melancholy share the same frame more often than the broad premise suggests.
This is a coming-of-age movie wearing the costume of a hard-R sex comedy. The bawdy hook gets people in the door, and then the film turns out to be sweet and conventional underneath. Stupnitsky has a genuine star performance and an idea about class that he never commits to chasing. Lawrence does the heavy lifting, finding the desperation and the decency in a woman who takes a degrading job because she has run out of options. The movie is funnier and sharper when it follows her than when it follows the premise.