It’s not that Sarah Jo hasn’t had any exposure to the notion of eroticism in her small slice of Los Angeles. Her single mother Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has been around the block a few times, often telling her daughters advisory tales about men. With her sensual Instagram videos, her gorgeous and influencer-in-the-making sister Treina (Taylour Paige) also seems healthily versed in that department. In order to no longer struggle with her lack of experience (she is still a virgin), Sarah Jo comes onto her employer Josh abruptly one day (a terrific Jon Bernthal, playfully sleazy), a daring act no one sees coming; neither he, nor us. Yes, Sarah Jo’s shocking boldness catches the seemingly kind and decent Josh off guard when his very pregnant wife Heather (Dunham) is off to work and his babysitter Sarah Jo is not supposed to do anything but help out with their disabled son and some minor chores around the house. He turns down her confident invitation to sex at first. But mutual attraction gets the better of him soon enough (minutes, actually) and the two fall into an affair.
Dunham unearths a refreshing amount of humor, honesty, and sincerity through Sarah Jo’s misadventures with Josh between bedsheets, at once challenging her complex (though not entirely unwarranted) reputation of being a tone-deaf and privileged one-trick pony, with her second-only feature. (Yes, it’s hard to believe that the “Girls” creator has only made two movies thus far.) It of course helps that her heroine here organically earns that sincerity, being an infinitely curious yet initially clueless woman—so clueless in fact that she asks questions like, “Go down on me? Go down … where?” and interprets the act of blowjob in the literal sense, like how one blows birthday candles after making a wish. Also on Dunham’s side is cinematographer Ashley Connor’s sensitive work, through a lens that sensitively blends eroticism and elegance, never forgetting that this is Sarah Jo’s journey; these are her terms.
It’s almost like a new movie starts when the inevitable heartbreak arrives for Sarah Jo (spoiler: Josh isn’t who he seems to be on the surface). With that begins a renewed excursion into X-rated corners of the web and trysts with strangers she meets online. Convinced that her lack of experience cost her the relationship with Josh, Sarah Jo swears she’ll never be a rookie in the bedroom again, making an alphabetical list of all sexual experiences—C for Creampie, E for Eiffel Tower, and so on—she’d like to tackle, one by one. In this process, she discovers that her favorite porn star is Vance Leroy (a wonderful and very funny Scott Speedman). It’s telling that Vance’s signature trait is gentlemanly masculinity, a characteristic that Sarah Jo finds deeply erotic in a world marked by anger, aggressiveness and male condescension.