no hard feelings

As an actress, Jennifer Lawrence can often be a victim of her own considerable talent. Her meteoric rise (an Oscar nominee at age 20 for Winter’s Bone and an actual Oscar winner just two years later for Silver Linings Playbook, in addition to launching a little franchise called The Hunger Games in-between), locked her into a certain type of career trajectory - a steady diet of agency-approved prestige projects and sturdy yet largely risk-free studio fare, such as Passengers and Red Sparrow (she's since publicly shaded her involvement in the former). But Lawrence has always operated with an edge of nonconformist defiance; a stubborn streak that causes her to dig in her heels and bare her incisors (figuratively speaking, of course) if she’s told what to do. It’s that obstinate spark that gives her stardom its extra fierce gleam.     

It’s also the reason why it’s almost irrationally thrilling to find her headlining a raunchy, R-rated comedy like No Hard Feelings - the sort of project most actresses would vent from their system long before solidifying their A-list standing. But Lawrence has long had a rowdy, tomboyish quality that rarely gets exploited on-screen… and which makes her uniquely suited to play Maddie Barker, a 32-year-old Montauk resident with no particular direction or ambition, whose short-term goal is simply holding on to her late mother’s house by hook or by crook. In one of those forgivable, only-in-the-movies type set-ups, Maddie - who works as an Uber driver - has her car repossessed (a near fatal blow to her financial prospects)… but soon discovers a wealthy couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) who are offering a Buick Regal in exchange for dating their socially awkward son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) and coaxing him out of his shell before he leaves for Princeton at summer’s end (some have been bizarrely clutching their pearls and fanning themselves over this premise, which makes you wonder what they’d make of a movie like Porky’s Revenge, or the entirety of the 80s in general). 

Feldman doesn’t have a particularly distinct look beyond general gawkiness, and at first there’s a fear that Lawrence will simply blow him off the screen - that this isn’t a fair fight. But much like Percy himself, he has a disarming comportment that keeps Maddie - and the audience - consistently off-balance. The movie was co-written and directed by Gene Stupnitsky, working in the same general register as his prior feature, 2019’s Good Boys (he also co-wrote Bad Teacher in 2011). No Hard Feelings is a very funny movie (you’ve probably heard about its Eastern Promises-inspired nude beach brawl, with Lawrence ascending to new heights of comedic fearlessness), though it never *quite* reaches the consistent, side-splitting nirvana of the very best comedies. The real draw, rather, is the deep appeal of its two lead characters, with Stupnitsky threading a very tricky needle in terms of what the realistic endgame for this relationship actually is. Maddie and Percy are both characters who need to grow up in different ways and for different reasons and basically need each other to do it - which is certainly nothing new (young adults stuck in a state of arrested development is basically a comedic subgenre unto itself), but their rapport has an engaging and unorthodox specificity that hooks in on an emotional level. ​

Much of the humor also benefits from a bracing sting (Maddie attends a pre-college mixer and discovers the hard way that high schoolers are a lot more immune to her sense of cool than she assumed). Feldman has a bright future (he’s like a guileless, high school version of Paul Rust), but the film, not surprisingly, belongs to Lawrence. Much has been made of how genuine movie stars are beginning to feel like an endangered species… the reasons for this are myriad, of course, but being called upon to predominately service franchise IP certainly doesn’t help the situation. Like all great comic actors, Lawrence suffers no vanity and isn’t afraid to go for broke (she crawls around on all fours, howling in lunatic agony after a misunderstanding causes Percy to mace her). But it can’t be overstated - perhaps given the degree to which she’s specialized in characters mature and capable beyond their years - how captivating it is watching her portray someone who’s the exact opposite… flawed and selfish, funny and cute, and, above all, relatable (just watching her skate awkwardly around Montauk in a pair of roller blades, for lack of alternate transportation options, is intensely charming). You can’t take your eyes off her. No Hard Feelings doesn’t cut as deeply as it might have (there’s a class conflict at the heart of the story that the movie is content to skim superficially), but Lawrence gives a bona fide movie star performance in a summer that - to date - has been largely bereft of them. Watching her on-screen is like taking a deep breath of precious oxygen.