No Hard Feelings review - nothing about this queasy comedy feels quite right

Last year Jennifer Lawrence won critical plaudits for her war-trauma drama Causeway, which seemingly signalled a bold new direction for her career, but how she got from there to No Hard Feelings is a bit of a mystery. Nothing about it feels quite right.

Sometimes it seems to want to be a gross-out comedy, occasionally it seems to think it’s distantly related to The Graduate and wants to give us a dose of ironic social commentary, and every now and again it gets a bit weepy and emotional, but never in a way that makes you want to join in.

Lawrence, now a venerable 32, plays Maddie Barker, a native of that jewel of the Hamptons, Montauk, who’s facing a premature mid-life crisis. Trying to make ends meet while living in the house her late mother left her, she’s a bartender by night and an Uber driver by day. However, the driving angle bites the dust when her car gets repossessed by local mechanic Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). Even though he’s one of her ex-boyfriends, Maddie can’t schmooze Gary into giving her a reprieve. When she tries, in a moment of ham-fisted slapstick, to steal her car from the back of Gary’s tow-truck, it merely makes matters worse.

She’s desperate and destitute, but she spots an ad on Craigslist which gives her a glimmer of hope. It’s been placed by Allison and Laird Becker (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick), who are looking for a rent-a-girlfriend to "date" their son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). Percy is a brainy 19-year-old who’s preparing to go to Princeton, but he’s also an introverted super-nerd with the social skills of a sack of cat litter. Despite being a little more “mature” than the stipulated “early-to-mid twenties” age range, Maddie puts on a leggy, brassy display to the parents and wins the gig. Her real objective is to bag the free Buick which the Beckers are offering with the job, so she can get back on the Uber trail.

Much fumbling dysfunctionality and cross-purposed embarrassment follows as Maddie brazenly vamps it up to try to part geeky Percy from his virginity, but there’s zero chemistry between the pair of them (Benjamin and Mrs Robinson it ain’t). Indeed, the whole premise feels tacky and tawdry, as illustrated when the Becker parents discuss how they’ve been monitoring their son’s online pornography consumption, like a couple of jaded voyeurs (pictured below, Lawrence with Natalie Morales as Sara).

The moment when Maddie and Percy suddenly find a glimmer of rapport when they discuss their respectively tortured backgrounds had to happen at some point, but the way director Gene Stupnitsky and writer John Phillips have handled it feels merely mechanical, failing to open up any revelatory emotional pathways that might make the drama feel even slightly three-dimensional. The all-round tone-deafness is especially glaring in a jarringly gratuitous sequence where Maddie and Percy go skinny-dipping in the sea at night, but have their clothes stolen by a group of mischievous revellers. The naked Maddie comes storming out of the waves to engage in unarmed combat with the perpetrators, as if Lawrence is yelling “hey, look at my great body!” (with just a smidgen of modesty airbrushing you-know-where).

Along the way, there’s a class-warfare interlude as Maddie finds herself in the middle of a gaggle of snotty rich kids holding a self-congratulatory party before they all go off to Princeton, and we learn that her own life has been blighted by the great divide between rich assholes from Manhattan and the Long Island natives who are just struggling to make an honest buck. So perhaps there’s just a little glimmer of Working Girl in there, too. Nicking bits of other movies is fine, but the trick is to create something fresh and fascinating out of them.

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