REVIEW: ‘I Want Your Sex’ Is A Fun Challenge To The Zoom Generations

Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, co-written with Karley Sciortino, is a fun, goofy, and hot time at the movies. Araki’s signature brand, using sex to at once titillate, upset, and provoke, is put to good use in a takedown of what troubles modern sexuality. I Want Your Sex is about Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), a guy in his early 20s, who needs a job so he can pull his weight on the rent with his best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders).

Elliot’s art degree isn’t doing him much good, but he eventually gets a job as an assistant to artist-provocateur Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), who almost immediately starts hitting on him. She makes sure he has a girlfriend first, Minerva (Charli XCX), so that when they start having sex, he doesn’t get weird and attached.

I Want Your Sex knows exactly what it wants to tell you and exactly how it wants to tell it to you, and it nails both. There’s long been a cultural miffed among older generations about how Gen Z isn’t having enough sex. It’s backed up by data, and it shows in their cultural output. Elliot and Minerva rarely have sex, and when they do, it seems quite bad. She’s too busy studying for exams, so she says, and can’t possibly focus on a carnal relationship. Even Apple pops in from time to time to remind you that she’s so unattuned to her sexuality that she’s probably gay and is just completely oblivious. 

I Want Your Sex suggests that maybe sexuality isn’t actually a Gen Z problem; it’s an Elliot problem.

But a movie about how dull the sex lives of Gen Z must be wouldn’t be very entertaining to watch, and neither would it be like Gregg Araki to leave it at that. When Erika takes Elliot under her wing, they don’t just get down; they get dirty. She essentially becomes his dom, taking him to places sexually he never knew he never knew. It’s to his enormous pleasure, and his great pain, because the rest of life becomes so dull by comparison.

Elliot’s co-worker, Zap (Mason Gooding), on the other hand, is Elliot’s complete opposite. He’s completely sexually liberated, talks about it openly all of the time, and is usually describing orgies or multiple encounters in a single day. But it’s never annoying. Neither is Elliot’s mixture of naivety and sincerity. Zap is just a fun hang, but he’s also kind and legitimately caring towards Elliot, despite having virtually nothing in common. And Elliot is just a sweet kid who means well and does well by always showing lots of respect to other people.

Zap is a suggestion that maybe sexuality isn’t a Gen Z problem; it’s an Elliot problem. That Gen Z is actually just as full of cool people as it is just full of losers. There’s a funny exchange early on in I Want Your Sex where Elliot tries to self-pathologize his generation’s sexuality to Erika, who retorts that she’s been in therapy since she was a small child. His excuses about the COVID era and parenting sound pre-bottled and lame.

Olivia Wilde portrays somebody as broken as she is hot.

As if Millennials didn’t have 9/11 and housing crises and recessions and lame parents to contend with too? The movie does a great job of proving that these problems aren’t universal to Elliot’s whole generation, with funny reveals and awkward encounters. Plus, Charli XCX may be playing a character dating a young 20-something, but she is famous for being a quintessential Millennial in real life. The irony in her character is sharp, and she plays it quite well.

Gregg Araki would be loath to admit, however, that Millennials like Erika are much better off sexually than Zoomers are. Erika makes a living tantalizing audiences with her sexually provocative art, but she also distances herself from it, claiming not to actually care at all. It’s only about the money for her, she says, and sex is just a fun tool to sell something to people.

This is, of course, more bluster than it is truth. Beneath the surface is a completely broken person, well portrayed by Olivia Wilde. In actuality, she uses rough—really coercive—sex to cover up her own insecurities, no differently than how Elliot uses his lack of sex to cover up his. She’s completely full of it, and her total takedown is a pleasure to watch unfold.

I Want Your Sex is a great takedown of everybody younger than Gregg Araki.

The double pinning of both generations is fantastic. It’s a subversion of expectations, both textually and metatextually, that comes to total satisfaction. Throughout I Want Your Sex, brief animated moments pop up to completely bewilder and disarm the audience.

It’s also buffeted by a satisfying frame story in which Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho question an arrested Elliot, who spills every one of his beans to them. The end of this movie is no different. It’s ironic, it’s campy, and it lets all the air out of the balloon in a glorious huff, reminding us to stop taking sex, and maybe life altogether, so seriously all the time.

I Want Your Sex is a great takedown of everybody younger than Gregg Araki, whose provocations and sense of humor are as fun to watch as they are frustrating to realize he’s completely right about. At a crisp 90-minutes, I Want Your Sex is a fun time, well-dressed, and going to make you feel just bad enough about yourself to make you squirm in awkward delight.

I Want Your Sex is in theaters July 31st.