I Want Your Sex: Gregg Araki’s wild art-world satire unspools as an enjoyable kinky-sex detective yarn

Ever since his early no-budget features and his 1992 breakthrough The Living End, Gregg Araki has been an enfant terrible of indie cinema, morphing from his New Queer Cinema beginnings into a darling of television, internet and feature-film fame. All along, he’s been catnip for young actors, drawing on an eclectic but ever-starry, ever-young stable to embody his ever-wilder scripts. With a genius for casting, Araki has been discovering and capitalising on the star power that he has often been the first to discern.

Araki’s new feature, I Want Your Sex, ratchets up the star quotient even as it repurposes the gaudy perversity of the archetypal Araki story with input from co-screenwriter Karley Sciortino, who based the original treatment on an ill-fated affair with her boss. Here goes: Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), a young rube cast in an LA mould, is living off the benevolence of his girlfriend Minerva (Charli xcx, no less) as he tries rather half-heartedly to find a job. It’s not an ideal match: she pays the rent and researches her doctoral dissertation, while he lies around and tries to convince her to have sex with him – unsuccessfully, usually (yes, the casting of Charli xcx as a sex-averse nerd is as hilarious as you might expect).

Elliot does finally land a job, as studio assistant to legendary artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde, no less). Bored, chewing gum to stick on to her giant vagina sketches, he soon discovers he’s been typecast as Erika’s newest sex toy. Hoffman is hilarious as the dimwit who can’t believe his good luck at being required to service his dominatrix employer, who soon ups the S&M ante. (Think Pillion without the tenderness.) Once Elliot moves in with his gay work pal (Mason Gooding) – who requires him to disappear whenever he has Grindr hook-ups or weekend orgies – Araki is back to basics.

But wait, let’s go back to the beginning. Like Billy Wilder with Sunset Boulevard (1950), Araki opens his film with a corpse floating face-down in a swimming pool, then continues with a flashback to the events leading up to the demise. Hoffman is the fall guy in this set-up. Hilariously, Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville are cast as the detectives investigating him: they try to convince him he’s been groomed by his boss even as they try to figure out who killed her. And by the way, where’s the body gone? The action flashes forward and back in time, as Araki leads the audience through dead ends and live wires. which he unspools in a kinky-sex detective yarn.

As the film settles into a groove, its klieg lights shine ever so brightly on Erika. She has a reputation to uphold as an art-world provocateur. When she enrols her newest staffer in a world of sexy sadomasochism, she’s also facing a deadline for her upcoming show. Drunk with lust, perfectly happy to worship at the altar of his dominatrix goddess, Elliot fails to see the warning signs about where this all is leading. Fall guy, welcome to the plot.

Araki has such fun mocking the art world that it’s hard not to follow his lead – or rather, leash. Erika is so busy directing sex with Elliot that it’s hard to imagine how she can get any work done. Sadomasochism may be too obvious a metaphor for the art world, but Araki’s twists and turns make it work. In the end, Erika’s show flops. Elliot, the ambushed star of the new work, flops too, into a panic of despair. Erika’s opening is panned, nothing sells, Erika’s career is over – until, soon enough, she is, too. Dead and disappeared, her fortunes reverse, and her prices soar. In calling 911, a panicked Elliot fills the role she wrote for him.

The director’s first film in a decade, I Want Your Sex is a very enjoyable divertissement, even as it sweats the details of S&M consent, the art world – and the limits of exploitation. Araki has described the film as “a sex-positive love letter to Gen Z”. Hmmm, maybe. But it’s also their lesson in how sex is never free or easy, burdened by rules and stakes fixed by the casino of life. With this cosmic game of blackjack, Gregg Araki manages to bring a spirit of transgression back to the screen, complete with colour, pop music and a wink-wink plot.

► I Want Your Sex is in UK cinemas 28 August.