I Want Your Sex Is a Queer, Punk Sex Comedy for Deeply Unsexy Times

When I first heard that I Want Your Sex was going to be Gregg Araki’s response to the widely discussed phenomenon of Gen Z’s relative celibacy, I felt equally trepidatious and excited. As a member of that generation (albeit on the older end), I’m always a little wary of any kind of broad, sweeping criticism coming from our predecessors. At the same time, it is factually true that Gen Z is having significantly less sex than prior generations, and if there were any filmmaker equipped to address that deficit, it would be the legendary New Queer Cinema pioneer. Thankfully, I Want Your Sex largely pulls it off — and marks a triumphant return to form for the director’s first feature length film in 12 years. Directed by Araki from a screenplay written by himself and Karley Sciortino, the movie stars Olivia Wilde as the wildly successful contemporary artist Erika Tracy, opposite Cooper Hoffman as Elliot, a young man whom she hires as an assistant, even though he doesn’t quite have the same uber-cool vibe as everyone else in the studio. It becomes clear pretty quickly that this seems to be a large part of the reason why Elliot was hired in the first place: Erika, whose art is all about sex to a comical degree, seems hungry for someone to corrupt. And Elliot, who’s in a dead relationship with his girlfriend Minerva (played excellently by Charli XCX), is all too eager to be Erika’s prey. The two begin a Dom/sub relationship, with Erika holding all the power and gradually coaxing Elliot into increasingly wild sexual scenarios. It would be all too easy to conclude that the relationship between the two is inherently problematic, but because this is an Araki flick, things aren’t so straightforward. That’s true even just in terms of form: The movie begins with Elliot, dazed and bloody, stumbling upon a dead body in a pool, and the story largely unfolds in the form of flashbacks as he is questioned by the police (played by the iconic duo of Margaret Cho and Johnn