Gregg Araki's First Film in 12 Years Asks Gen Z: 'Why Don't You Have Sex?'

Gregg Araki has not had a feature in theaters since 2014's White Bird in a Blizzard. His return, I Want Your Sex, co-written with his Now Apocalypse collaborator Karley Sciortino, opened in limited U.S. release on July 31 — twelve years after that last film, as IndieWire counts it.

The thing that shaped it was a number he came across late in the writing: roughly three in ten of Gen Z had gone the previous year without sex.

“That's actually a real article that I had read, sort of as I was doing the last drafts of the script, probably maybe the very last or the second last, and it became kind of the major theme of the movie,” Araki told Out. The statistic turns up in the film almost verbatim, offered by Erika as she makes her case to Elliot.

The setup

Olivia Wilde plays Erika Tracy, an artist whose reputation is built on provocation. Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, the young assistant she takes on as a sexual subordinate. Charli xcx, Chase Sui Wonders, Mason Gooding, Daveed Diggs, Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville fill out the cast. It premiered at Sundance in January, where Magnolia Pictures secured the U.S. rights after a bidding war, and it runs 90 minutes.

Araki told Out that Erika speaks for him.

“This notion of the Erika Tracy character, in a way, very much speaks for me because she, like myself, is an artist who deals with a lot of sexual themes and sexuality in her work,” he said. “Her work is controversial; it's provocative. All the things people have said about my movies all these years.” Variety's write-up of a separate interview describes Wilde's character as Araki's “mouthpiece” in the film.

The line worth stopping on

Speaking to Variety at the opening night of OutfestNEXT, Araki was blunt about the reports of a generation having less sex: “Like, why don't you have sex? What's going on?” Elsewhere in the same interview he got more specific:

“And also, they're being filmed and videotaped constantly. If I thought somebody was going to film me going into that gay bar back when I was a teenager, would I have done it? Probably not. Those things need to happen in private.”

Here is our read, and it is ours rather than his: that is not really a complaint about phones. It is a description of a closet that changed shape rather than disappeared — the door unlocked, the street outside on camera.

Araki also put the stakes in terms of his own age. “I'm in my 60s now. You're gonna turn around and you're going to be 40, 50 like that,” he said. “Will you regret not taking a chance, venturing out of your house, risking getting hurt, getting confused, getting your heart broken? Go out on a bad date, have that bad relationship, have that bad girlfriend. Be in love with the wrong person. That's fucking life! That's growing up! That's how you learn about yourself.”

Opening Outfest's rebuild

I Want Your Sex was the opening-night screening at OutfestNEXT, which Variety describes as rebuilding after a two-year hiatus caused by financial and management issues. Araki received Outfest's achievement award in 2005, the year after Mysterious Skin.

“I'm so excited to be here at the rebirth of Outfest. My movies have always been by, for and about queer people. So, it's my people,” he said. “Also, I've lived here almost all my life. It's L.A., it's queer. It's coming home!”

That opening night ran at the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Renberg Theatre; we map the city's gay bars and clubs in our Los Angeles listings.

One measure of how much the industry moved while he was away: this is the first film on which Araki has used an intimacy coordinator, and he told Variety he leaves the decision to his actors. By his account Wilde arrived with “much more” experience doing nude scenes than Hoffman, who had done none. “He's never done a nude scene, never done a sex scene, but Cooper was very like, ‘This scares the shit out of me. But that's why I want to do it!'” Araki said.

What the reviews say

Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 89% — the share of 116 counted reviews rated positive, not an average score — and its critics' consensus carries no reservations at all: the film is “one of indie stalwart Gregg Araki's most accessible works yet,” a “bawdy dramedy” that “leverages well-judged performances by Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman to deliver incisive commentary on carnality and connection.” Audiences have been cooler. The site's Popcornmeter sits at 58%, from a much smaller pool of 50-plus verified ratings.

The two full reviews we read are both positive and both qualified. Variety's Peter Debruge writes that “once you get past the shock, the plot falls apart,” then waves the problem away on the grounds that Araki hit his main goal of “getting a repressed generation to loosen up about sex.” IndieWire's David Ehrlich graded it B-, allowing that “a Gregg Araki movie will never be boring, and this one is a good time even when it's tripping over itself to complicate its story and disguise the fact that it's trying to serve as a teachable moment.”

Ehrlich's complaints run from the visual — this is “the most visually stilted” of the director's work, he writes — through to the casting. The one most likely to stick with our readers is his note on Mason Gooding, an actor he says has “screen presence to spare,” playing a character who “never evolves beyond the sassy gay slut archetype that we've seen a million times before.”

Araki's own last word in the Variety interview is about distribution. “It is [still] hard to get a movie made, hard to get a movie distributed,” he said. “So, I'm just grateful that we got this made and that it's going to be out in theaters!”