Review: 'I Want Your Sex' presents Gregg Araki in his familiar stance as a neon-soaked provocateur, but targeting the art world and prudish Gen Z feels beneath him

The filmmaker Gregg Araki has been pushing buttons for decades, with movies like “The Doom Generation” and “Smiley Face,” so it’s no surprise that his latest, “I Want Your Sex,” tosses out provocations like they were flyers advertising an art gallery opening.

What’s surprising, and not in the best way, is that he directs those barbs at some of the lowest-hanging fruit of all: The contemporary art market and stuffiness about sex.

Araki begins with an obvious homage to “Sunset Blvd.,” but in reverse. Here, it’s the possibly unhinged woman, L.A. artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), floating face-down in the pool, and her boy toy, a gallery intern named Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), discovering her there. Elliot also narrates the story, in the form of an interrogation from two disbelieving detectives (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville, who give ironically the most normal performances here).

The movie zooms back 9-1/2 weeks (a 40-year-old movie reference; look it up, kids), to show how Elliot ended up in Erika’s orbit. He’s unemployed, mooching off his bi-curious best friend Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) and being ignored by his post-doc girlfriend Minerva (Charli XCX), when he interviews to be an intern at Erika’s gallery.

Erika hires Elliot, but soon the young intern realizes there’s more to the job than writing press releases and chewing gum for her next art project. Nope, Erika is soon using Elliot for her personal sexual pleasures, which venture into leather, blindfolds, paddles and the kinkier parts of the Amazon inventory. He sticks with this because it turns him on, though Erika’s top assistant, Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), warns him, “You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.”

Araki employs a candy-colored palette to suck Elliot and us into Erika’s art world — a world Erika breezily admits floats on enough B.S. and hucksterism to make P.T. Barnum envious. The director, again working with his “Now Apocalypse” co-screenwriter Karley Sciortino, also throws in some sharp commentary about Gen Z’s monastic aversion to sex, then confronts the audience about that attitude by including enough sexual content that the credits list two intimacy coordinators. (How this movie got an R rating is for scholars to figure out.)

Where “I Want Your Sex” becomes most entertaining is in how it squares the veteran Wilde, who’s at her most uninhibited here, with the comparatively green Hoffman. There’s 19 years between these performers, and they throw themselves into that age gap with enthusiasm. 

Araki tosses so much juice into his dismantling of the art market that he has difficulty bringing the story together in the finale, which of course brings us back to that pool scene and what follows. The resolution isn’t nearly so fun as the build-up that led up to it.

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‘I Want Your Sex’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 31, at several theaters. Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, and pervasive language. Running time: 90 minutes.