No Hard Feelings

In recent years, as the romantic comedy has done a slow fade-out from the big screen, it often seems to have taken sex right along with it. Maybe that accounts for the extraordinary interest sparked by the trailer for — and media coverage of — “No Hard Feelings,” a sort of romantic comedy about a 32-year-old out-of-work Uber driver, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who gets involved with a gawky 19-year-old virgin geek who’s about to enter Princeton. There’s been some moralistic pearl-clutching over the trailer, though probably for the very same reason that the movie could connect: It looks a little pervy. Yet when you see “No Hard Feelings,” you realize that the film’s promise of risky business is little more than a big tease. Lawrence’s Maddie is an underachiever who grew up in Montauk, the picturesque sea village at the tip of Long Island, and never left. An unapologetic and at times combative hedonist, with a pattern of dating men for a few months only to ghost them, she lives in the house she inherited from her mother. It’s all paid off, but she’s going to lose the place unless she can keep up with the escalating property taxes — and to do that she needs her Uber job, which is going to be a problem, since her car just got repossessed (with one of her exes, played by “The Bear’s” Ebon Moss-Bachrach, doing the towing).

Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) is the aforementioned 19-year-old, whose wealthy parents (Matthew Broderick, smug in long gray boomer hair, and Laura Benanti) have a posh home in Montauk, and it seems they’ve devoted their lives to overprotecting him. They’re helicopter perfectionists who track his every move, have the passcode to his phone, and have made sure that his entire existence exemplifies the safe-space generation. The result? Percy is a morose loner with no friends, who doesn’t drive or drink or do anything fun, and is getting ready to ship off to college as a monkish arrested-development case. So his desperate folks place an ad on Craigslist. They’re looking for a woman in her early-to-mid-20s who can hang out with Percy, go on dates with him, and take his virginity. They see it all as college prep. Since the reward they’re offering for popping Percy’s cherry is a Buick Regal, the situation lines up rather perfectly with Maddie’s need for a car. True, she’s a little older than the woman they’re looking for, but according to the film’s logic that just makes her a more knowing erotic tutor.