Gregg Araki has never treated restraint as a moral virtue. I Want Your Sex, his first feature in more than a decade, arrives covered in primary colors, phallic artwork, latex, bad judgment, and the kind of characters who announce themselves before they enter a room. It is loud by design. The surprise is how often it is also tender.
Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, an aimless young man hired by Erika Tracy, a celebrated artist who has made provocation both her medium and her brand. Erika is played by Olivia Wilde with absolute control. She speaks in declarations, moves through her studio as if every person in it were part of an installation, and regards ordinary boundaries as evidence of somebody else's limited imagination. When she chooses Elliot as her assistant and sexual muse, he enters a relationship built on submission, curiosity, and a workplace imbalance the film is too intelligent to ignore, even when it is having too much fun to sit with it for long.
Wilde is the reason the movie works. Erika could have been a collection of costumes and commands, but Wilde finds the fatigue underneath the performance. This is a woman who has spent years selling the idea that nothing can embarrass or wound her. The more outrageous she becomes, the clearer it is that the persona has started to harden around her. Wilde makes Erika funny without reducing her to a joke, and dangerous without pretending that danger is the same thing as depth.
Hoffman gives her a useful opposite. Elliot is not innocent so much as unfinished. His passivity is sometimes frustrating, but Hoffman understands that the character's blankness is part of the point. He is trying on desire, adulthood, and identity all at once. Small details do a surprising amount of work, including the gold hoop in his ear and the words "yes" and "no" tattooed across opposite hands. Elliot wants clear instructions, but Araki keeps placing him in situations where permission and desire refuse to stay that simple.
Wilde makes Erika funny without reducing her to a joke, and dangerous without pretending that danger is the same thing as depth.
Araki shoots the film like a pop collage. The production design is crowded with suggestive objects, the costumes communicate status before anyone speaks, and the editing keeps punching through scenes with a restless comic rhythm. The visual excess is not decoration. It reflects Erika's need to make every private impulse public, marketable, and impossible to misread.
The supporting cast understands the assignment. Chase Sui Wonders brings warmth and comic timing as Apple, Elliot's roommate and closest friend. Mason Gooding and Daveed Diggs thrive in the film's more openly satirical corners, while Charli XCX is very funny playing Minerva with a flat, academic detachment that makes Elliot's growing obsession seem both inevitable and ridiculous. Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville appear as police officers in a late shift toward murder mystery, a turn that gives the movie momentum but also exposes how loosely some of its pieces are connected.
The film's central argument is its weakest element. Araki is clearly interested in the supposed sexual caution of younger adults, and Erika repeatedly treats boundaries, labels, and negotiated consent as symptoms of a generation afraid to surrender control. There is a real tension there, especially in a culture that wants intimacy to be spontaneous and completely risk-free at the same time. Still, the movie occasionally stacks the deck. Elliot's generation is made to look repressed so Erika's recklessness can look liberating, even when the relationship's professional and emotional coercion deserves more than a punch line.
That imbalance keeps I Want Your Sex from becoming the sharper film hiding inside it. The murder plot arrives before the emotional consequences have fully settled, and the brisk 90-minute runtime leaves several characters as vivid sketches rather than people. Araki's energy carries the movie through those gaps, but the ending lands with less force than the setup promises.
None of that makes the film timid. At a time when many studio movies seem embarrassed by physical desire, Araki puts sex back on screen as something comic, destabilizing, selfish, affectionate, and impossible to reduce to a lesson. I Want Your Sex is not a manifesto, despite Erika's best efforts. It is a messy comedy about people who use certainty to disguise how frightened they are of being seen.
