Sharp Stick

Even as Sharp Stick deals with extremely adult material, it adopts a purposeful innocence that makes Dunham’s latest work less counterintuitive than it might seem.

Even when Dunham seems intent on driving them all into a narrative ditch, it’s worth the rubbernecking.

It’s nearly impossible to make anything good when the internet is telling you to kill yourself on a daily basis. The fact that Dunham persists is accomplishment enough.

For a filmmaker known for her transgression, Dunham has a weird underlying conservatism...

Sharp Stick is hardly a film by an artist who’s in the clear, culturally -- and it’s a better movie for embracing vulnerability anyway, whether the knives out or not.

Where is this all going, and what does it all mean? Every main character in “Sharp Stick” is hopelessly lost on one level or another, but nobody really grows or reaches any kind of self-actualization.

As confounding as the character’s quirks are ... what follows is a sex-positive journey of self-discovery that’s a sweet as it is explicit.

While the plot stretches plausibility, Dunham knows how to write a great scene, and the sexual meet-cute between Sarah Jo and Josh is about as grimly hilarious as they come.

Beyond attempts to plumb the depths of Dunham’s psyche, it’s hard to figure out what to make of “Sharp Stick.” It’s visually stylized and compellingly strange, but it’s not clear what, exactly, it’s trying to challenge.

With Sharp Stick, director Lena Dunham turns in her best work to date - a bold and meaningful tale of self-discovery that invites us to embrace ourselves.