Is Jennifer Lawrence’s New Age Gap Rom-Com As Creepy As It Seems? (2024)

No Hard Feelings, the Jennifer Lawrence–led R-rated film about a 32-year-old woman who is hired by the parents of a 19-year-old boy to “date his brains out,” opened this week to reviews that were, perhaps unsurprisingly, mixed. While the film currently boasts an 88 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, its score with critics is a less impressive 66 percent. One can’t help but wonder whether the movie’s divided reception is attributable to its divisive plot: a thirtysomething trying to have sex with a teenager under false pretenses is, obviously, frowned upon. While such age gaps haven’t exactly been rare in recent movies—the past few years have seen the releases of Licorice Pizza, Call Me By Your Name, and Elvis—it’s tricky territory for a studio film that’s often described as a rom-com. Lawrence herself has called the film “so offensive and so wrong.” Is she right? If you’re curious how the movie navigates its cringeworthy premise but don’t actually want to see it, or are afraid of going in blind, allow me to explain. (Spoilers follow.)

The first way in which No Hard Feelings sidesteps outright offensiveness is via consistent reminders of the untoward nature of the main couple’s relationship. It may depict bad behavior, but it doesn’t endorse it. Even before Lawrence’s character, Maddie, is verbally contracted to bed this unsuspecting teenager, the movie presents her as something very far from a role model. She has clearly used and then ghosted many men in her beloved hometown of Montauk. She’s also a general mess. After the car she uses as an Uber driver gets repossessed, she answers a Craigslist ad posted by a rich couple (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick) looking for a slightly older woman to go out with their brilliant but introverted son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), and break him out of his shell before he heads to Princeton in the fall. In turn, Maddie gets their Buick Regal, which she needs to continue Ubering, her ticket to saving her home.

The awfulness of the deal is similarly underlined and played from the beginning for laughs. As Maddie interviews for the job, she stumbles over admitting her actual age. And if you’re wondering whether his parents are overlooking the possibility that Percy may not be attracted to women, the movie anticipates this too, batting it away when Percy’s parents assure her that their son is not gay, just shy. They know this, they helpfully explain, because they’ve seen the graphic (but definitely hetero) p*rn he has been watching.

Throughout the bulk of the film, as Percy and Maddie begin to “date,” the movie then executes two maneuvers simultaneously. First, it contrives multiple ways to keep Maddie’s and Percy’s hips at least a Bible’s length apart. It’s no surprise that, even when presented with a woman as attractive as Jennifer Lawrence, Percy requires emotional intimacy as a precursor to physical intimacy. But even when Percy and Maddie do, eventually, make out, Percy becomes so anxious that he breaks out in hives before things can advance any further. (He apologizes, comically promising to “put out” at a future date.) Second, everywhere they go, the people around the unlikely couple don’t hesitate to point out how weird the pairing is. Kyle Mooney shows up as Jody, Percy’s former nanny, who essentially accuses Maddie of pedophilia or of seducing Percy for his parents’ money. Later, Percy and Maddie are out at a restaurant when Percy is noticed by a classmate who at first mistakes Maddie for a member of Percy’s family, then gets in a pointed dig about Maddie’s age after being informed that she isn’t.

Finally, Maddie herself begins to pull back from Percy and his parents’ arrangement when she sees how attached Percy is becoming. At the film’s climax, when Maddie resigns herself to getting Percy to climax, it’s a comedy of errors. Percy, having recently discovered his parents’ arrangement with Maddie, convinces her to do the deed with him even though he secretly wrecked the Buick she was promised. In other words, this time he’ll be the one trying to initiate a sexual encounter under false pretenses. She agrees, but he hilariously prematurely org*sms after a millisecond of mistakenly penetrating between her thighs as opposed to anywhere inside her, mostly ruining his halfhearted revenge plot.

By the film’s end, Maddie and Percy, having come clean about all their manipulations, end as really good friends. Which is still sort of weird, but not as weird as the alternative. Percy ends the film still technically a virgin—though he swears that his embarrassing sexual experience still counts. Because the film takes their friendship seriously but doesn’t take their romantic relationship seriously at all—the most heartwarming moments of the film happen when the two are simply getting to know each other and supporting each other through life’s difficult moments, and the funniest are in the pursuit of any physical action—the film mostly skates by. Any viewers looking for something so offensive and so wrong can do better. Sorry, Jen!