Review: Jennifer Lawrence and ‘No Hard Feelings’ deliver a just-right summer sex comedy

In 2018, Jennifer Lawrence was 28 and one of the biggest movie stars in the world: an Academy Award-winning actor , a veteran of the “Hunger Games” franchise, alternating between prestige projects and giant action movies. But not all of those films were good, and Lawrence didn’t seem to be having all that much fun. So she fired her agents and took a break to get married and have a baby. It was a smart move, because Lawrence is back now, and it’s a whole new ball game.

Last year, Lawrence produced and starred in the gritty indie film “Causeway,” as a veteran recovering from a traumatic brain injury, for a first-time female director, Lila Neugebauer. Her follow-up swings in the opposite direction, kicking up her heels in a good old-fashioned sex comedy, “No Hard Feelings,” which she also produced.

Directed by Gene Stupnitsky (“Good Boys”), “No Hard Feelings” is a direct descendant of ‘80s teen coming-of-age comedies but evolved for a new generation. It’s a “Superbad”-style story with the sensitivity and class consciousness of John Hughes, a delightfully raunchy streak, and Lawrence going for broke in a bold and bawdy performance as a rowdy Long Island surfer girl doing her best Mae West.

There simply aren’t enough female dirtbags in cinema, so Lawrence’s Maddie Barker — Uber driver, surly bartender and pissed-off Montauk townie — is a refreshing character. Her car’s been just repossessed, towed by her ex Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and with unpaid property tax bills looming, she needs wheels.

Enter the weirdest Craigslist ad of all time: A pair of wealthy helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) would like to “arrange” for a young woman to date their sheltered, nerdy son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) in exchange for a Buick. Maddie needs a car, and she’s willing to romance a (legal) teenager, so off she roller skates for what she hopes will be a quick and easy venture into sex work.

But of course, it’s never about the destination but the friends we make along the way, and “No Hard Feelings” would never deny us that journey. Maddie and Percy forge a bond after a disastrous date that results in both experiencing harrowing bodily harm while in the buff, and something like a friendship blossoms between these two oddballs, who are odd in different ways. He’s 19, she’s 32; he’s obsessed with rules, she’s on probation.

Feldman, a 21-year-old Broadway star (“Dear Evan Hansen”) in his first starring film role, shines as Percy, the anxious, cautious foil to Maddie’s reckless wild child. There’s a beautiful subtlety to his performance and a precision to his physicality that makes him an incredibly compelling screen presence, and their opposites-attract chemistry is ridiculously charming.

What makes “No Hard Feelings” so sharp and funny though, isn’t the raunchy jokes or the physical comedy (though the sight of Lawrence bouncing Feldman on her knee might be the funniest image onscreen this summer), it’s the savagery of the generational social commentary underpinning the script by Stupnitsky and John Phillips, and no generation is safe.

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The overbearing Gen X parents enable their anxious, self- and cellphone-obsessed zoomer children, jettisoning discipline while trying to be “cool,” locked in a toxic co-dependent dynamic that never allows their children to fail, or succeed. Meanwhile, the poor millennials are immature, jobless and living at home — too young to own property and too old to be TikTok stars, but at least they know how to have a good time. It’s a scarily accurate skewering that should hopefully inspire some self-reflection.

“No Hard Feelings” feels more substantive in these moments of cultural observation and emotional depth. Maddie needs a car to save her house, and Percy needs a date in order to come out of his shell. But what they both really need, and what they find, is someone to just listen and to share vulnerability in return. Maddie might push Percy to do embarrassing, scary things, but in return, he pushes her to do the same.

The third act is a bit rushed and rickety — the big climactic moment is too wacky, the denouement all too easy. But the preceding 90 minutes are such an easy-breezy, uninhibited good time, anchored by two killer comedic performances and surprisingly moving insights that make “No Hard Feelings” just the right kind of sweet, intoxicating comedy cocktail to kick off the summer.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.