‘I Want Your Sex’ is not sexy

The first Gregg Araki film I saw was Mysterious Skin. It was 2005 and I was on a Joseph Gordon-Levitt kick, watching it back to back with Brick, also starring Gordon-Levitt and dealing with crime, but of a very different nature. One has a dreamlike synthetic glow in the face of trauma and the other is lacklustre in its contention with reality (lacklustre as the absence of additional light). What I remember most from Mysterious Skin is that while the film dealt with queer subject matter, it did it in a way that infused it with a plurality; it portrayed gay existence as a part of the world rather than something that’s isolated or siphoned off: and, and instead of and, however.

I went back to Araki a few years ago, and I’m glad I waited. To enjoy his films is to loosen your grip on reality in a way that allows you to reconcile clawing angst with a rapacious taste for life via deliriously hot casts and excellent soundtracks. This meant, for myself, a capacity to enjoy both the popular and niche simultaneously, something Araki achieves when he’s at his best. His best-known films are from his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy: Totally F***ed Up, Doom Generation and Nowhere. They are incredibly sexy, acerbic and lusciously shot earmarks of their contemporaneous time that do just that. His new film I Want Your Sex is, for better or for worse, very much a depiction of ours.

I Want Your Sex is about a recent art school graduate, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), who gets hired as an assistant for Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), an artist known for her racy/pornographic/transgressive work (there’s an image of a piece of hers that just looks like a print of a Mapplethorpe). The two quickly engage in a domme/sub sexual relationship (Elliot/Erika), and like with any cinematic depiction of a workplace romance, it goes off its structural rails very quickly. 

Elliot, all the while, is dating Minerva, played by Charli XCX, who hilariously attempts an American accent that is so bad it’s good. Minerva is emotionally unavailable and sexually disinterested. “She looks like if AI generated a huge bitch,” says Apple (Elliot’s best friend, played by Chase Sui Wonders) about Minerva. His attraction to a dom like Erika seems like a pretty obvious resolution of Elliot’s romantic situation.

The film—as Araki’s usually are—is a portrait of Los Angeles, this time extra garish and full of lime-piss yellow and amorphous/squiggly interior decor. In an early scene of the film, Elliot wears a Sonic Youth LP T-shirt, but it’s stark white and new; Apple wears a Spahn Ranch one. We get it, you’re in Hollywood and you’re obsessed with it! 

So is Araki, but unlike Elliot’s suspiciously fresh shirt, Araki’s work is usually levelled with some more niche roots, excelling at that sweet balance of mainstream and subculture. Production for the film started in 2024, colliding with Charli XCX’s release of BRAT, an album itself obsessed (and at odds) with fame and famous people. Cooper Hoffman and Mason Gooding joined the cast as film legacy kids (of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Cuba Gooding Jr.), and Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville as heralds of very different forms of transgression (and as cops, which is hilarious, and they’re both excellent!).

This film is theoretically about transgressive sex, but that sex is, disappointingly, only used as a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. As a result, the film is not sexy, staying on the surface instead of getting deeper, hotter, stickier. It places the domme/sub relationship in the world at large, but within a workplace power dynamic that not only replicates it but clownishly inflates it. This is a technique that can push a work past the edge, but I Want Your Sex remains teetering instead. I’m not sure if the lack of depth is because it’s framed as a satire of both BDSM and the art world, but the result is a lack of anchorage, which in the final act sets the film sailing toward its doom.

Elliot gets what he wants—full cuck mode activated!—but he keeps talking about how his life is on fire, or how he wants Erika but can’t have her, but this is exactly what he wants. His gorgeously glowing straight(-forward) fantasy of Erika that he entertains while he’s fucking Minerva made me miss the Araki of the past, where in a movie like 1997’s Nowhere, his protagonists might daydream about monogamy within the sexual fantasy, but at least they’re not thinking about starting a family. His pro- and antagonists of the 1990s and early 2000s were at odds with society as it stood, or at least held complex relationships to them. With I Want Your Sex, we just get speed-drive capitalism with little doubt or reservations.

Araki is definitely trying to level a critique on some fronts, and the film has some really prescient and exciting conversations and tries out some interesting things. It might just be that I Want Your Sex is way too accurate in its depiction of our time, working as a mirror with no funhouse distortion. 

The full resolution of Elliot’s wish fulfilment at the end of the film is so on the nose it’s yucky, but it’s also preceded by a scene that made my heart swell with wistful nostalgia. I was faced, as Mason Gooding’s character Zap quips to Elliot, with “the sad reality of now.”