Rated D for Desperate

Jennifer Lawrence plays the seducer.

- BILGE EBIRI

TOO EARNEST PERHAPS to qualify as a sex comedy and not quite romantic enough to count as a romantic comedy, No Hard Feelings is a perfect example of how the best kind of onscreen chemistry is fundamentally unquantifiable. The premise is simple, raunchy, maybe even transgressive for our oh-so-prudish times: Jennifer Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, a 32-year-old Montauk bartender and Uber driver who accepts a paid gig to have sex with Percy Becker (Andrew Barth Feldman), the painfully shy Princeton-bound 19-year-old son of a wealthy couple who want him to come out of his shell and gain confidence before heading off to college. A Montauk native, Maddie can't stand the rich, gentrifying jagoffs who spend only part of the year in her hometown, buying up property and pushing locals out of the area. But she takes the job because there's a Buick Regal at the end of it, and her car was just repossessed ahead of the busy (and lucrative) summer season. Besides, as one of Maddie's friends puts it, "These people use us. So why don't we use them?"