Spoilers Below! It's not really the kind of movie I think can be "spoiled" by knowing the plot beats, a lot of it comes out in the execution. But you have been warned!
There are two sequences in No Hard Feelings that define the tone of the film.
The first happens at a restaurant, where Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) and Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) are having a make up prom cause neither of them could go to theirs. Maddie convinces Percy to go over to piano and play a song. He starts to play a rendition of Hall & Oates' Maneater, and while he's playing the camera rests on a wide shot of Maddie, just reacting. They have started to break the ice a little bit in their fake relationship, but this is the first time she is really seeing him as a person outside of her goal to sleep with him and get his parent's car. Lawrence plays it beautifully, letting her teary eyes do the kind of work that no dialogue could. She is both guilty for the awful thing that she is doing to this kid, and also overwhelmed with joy getting to be the witness to this beautiful moment and realizing who he really is. This is the moment the movie turns from one kind of movie into another entirely, and it is all resting on the emotions on her face.
The second sequence has Maddie and Percy going skinny dipping on the beach as part of her effort to get him so horned up that he finally sleeps with her. While in the water, a bunch of drunk teens on the shore start making fun of them and steal their clothes. So Maddie emerges from the ocean like truth coming out of her well and, in full frontal nudity, beats the shit out of them in an over the top wrestling match.
If either of these peak your interest, then you're probably going to find a good amount to like in this movie.
The plot is familiar. Maddie is a down on her luck asshole in the resort town of Montauk, NY. She is barely maintaining, getting into bad relationships she isn't emotionally committed to outside of cheap sex, working as an Uber driver and bartender to keep paying for her deceased mother's house, and surfing on the beach with her townie friends (Natalie Morales, Scott MacArthur, and Zahn McClarnon). But living in Long Island is expensive and her car gets repossessed, leaving her unable to get an income driving summer tourists and putting her house at risk. So she responds to an ad in the paper from Laird and Allison Becker (Matthew Broderick sporting a really bizarre hairdo and Laura Benanti, who has a much more standard one) offering a free car to anyone who will "date" their son Percy. And by "date," they mean "have sex with before he goes to Princeton in the fall."
Percy is a sweet, sheltered boy who doesn't really have any friends or a life outside of his helicopter parents and people on the internet. He works at the local animal shelter and is more interested in playing Mortal Kombat then hanging out with people. Laird and Allison want to give him the chance to spread his wings a little before leaving for college, and a quick summer fling that they orchestrate without his knowledge seems like just the thing. At first it's rocky. In their first encounter Maddie comes off so strong and so unnaturally seductive that he maces her assuming she is kidnapping him ("I can't kidnap you, you're 19!"). But eventually they grow closer and become friends outside of Laird and Allison's arrangement, and with new emotional stakes comes more trepidation on the way that Maddie is using him.
First things first, the movie is very funny. The supporting cast gives a lot of life to what are otherwise pretty stock setups. Natalie Morales is a joy as always, while Scott MacArthur is playing a Danny McBride type here. He and Morales have a very easy chemistry where you can see them as a couple who argues all of the time but still are in lockstep. If you've never seen Reservation Dogs take Zahn McClarnon's small role here as a limited preview of the big swings he does on that show, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach has a very funny turn as one of Maddie's exes who owns a towing company that takes her car. She calls him annoyingly indecisive, which she takes advantage of when she tries to steal her car back while he is stuck on his coffee order. Kyle Mooney makes a brief appearance as Percy's nanny, a role that is sadly sidelined for the most part which is a real shame cause the glimpses we see have such potential. Broderick and Benanti are excellent as always, simultaneously stating their total respect for all sex workers while also trying as hard as they can to not spell out their proposal in such transactional terms. At one point Laird tries to approach the possibility of abortion with "if you were to 'date' somebody the organic way," which may be my hardest laugh in the movie.
But the movie is ultimately a character study of two people, and the ways in which their hurt is mirrored not just by their own broken selves but also the community they were brought up in. Percy is a social pariah at school after a rumor of him sleeping in his parents room at age 11 turns incestuous, and because he relies so much on his parents wealth and influence he has isolated himself in a bubble of helplessness to the world outside. Maddie on the other hand has had to fight for her life in Montauk since she was born. Her father is one of the rich New Yorkers who comes to the town for the summers, and after her mom became pregnant he went AWOL. Maddie tried to reach out in the past when she had ambitions to surf coast to coast, but the letter was returned to sender, crushing her spirits and leaving her stuck in town ever since. I was somewhat surprised how much the movie leaned into these moments. The movie isn't really a love story (just check the tagline) but it does have a romantic streak to it that comes out in how Maddie & Percy grow on other.
The movie has been hailed as the return of the summer studio comedy, that beautiful dying breed of movie. It is definitely a comedy, but it's really far less outrageous in execution then films like Bridesmaids or Trainwreck. Instead it's tone is more similar to, say, Hal Ashby's The Landlord, another comedy about the foibles of the upper class and the ripple effects that lifestyle has on everyone around it. I wouldn't say that No Hard Feelings is anywhere near as fiery as something like The Landlord. It doesn't have the same political bent, keeping it's observations situational rather then systemic. But it is grappling with similar questions, and seems more interested in letting the narrative play out in a way that gives it's two stars room to perform the emotional heft necessary to feel those struggles instead of going for the cheap gag, give or take a punch to the throat.
So, inevitably, the house of cards must fall. When Maddie hears Percy talking about how he will come up from Princeton on weekends to visit, she starts to freak out. While she tries to manage his expectations, he announces to his parents that he is dropping out of college to stay in Montauk with his new girlfriend. In their shuffle to contact Maddie to ask her to drop the whole thing, Percy overhears them and is devastated. So he does his own subterfuge, inviting Maddie to dinner with his parents while he ruins the car she was promised. Then, after he can't get her to admit to what she is doing to him, they sleep together before he reveals what he's done. It's ugly, and not even the "you didn't cum IN me, just on my thighs" beat can't take away from the ruination of the moment. Percy, the man scorned, says "the truth is someday I'll be living in Paris and you'll still be here." At the end of the day, Maddie is once again being used by the same people who used her mother. Both characters are stuck in perpetual arrested development, because sometimes it's easier to live in the narrative you were told you belong in.
I've never seen a movie with Andrew Barth Feldman before, but I'm impressed with what he brings to the table here. It would be easy to see a version of this movie where he plays his dorkiness too strongly, leaning into a Revenge of the Nerds type. Instead he comes off as sweet and sincere, a nice boy who maybe needs to spread his wings a little but will figure it all out. He's also genuine in how he's annoying. It doesn't feel like a tic when he keeps messing up Maddie's clunky seduction. Him singing Maneater on the piano is set up in an earlier scene, where he hears the song in a bar and tells her how it always scared him as a kid cause he imagined the terrible monster, The Man Eater, to Maddie's bemusement. He really is trying to connect with her but because he doesn't understand her motives he can't reciprocate her seeming lust. When he ultimately makes his move to screw her over, it is cruel and cowardly in a way that is exactly in character.
But at the end of the day this is Jennifer Lawrence's movie. I've liked her dramatic turns in the past (if you want to call mother! "dramatic") but it is clear that she is also a gifted physical comedian. There is a running sight gag of her skirting around the town on a pair of roller skates in the absence of a car, and the way she manages to find variety in "looking goofy while roller skating" every time is a testament to that skill. She also has impeccable timing, like a scene at the dog shelter where she drags over a side bench in front of the desk Percy is sitting at to better seduce him, only to be so short that he can only see her head. It's an easy gag that works because of how she commits to hitting every beat of it with precision. Maddie isn't really supposed to be a "likable" character, more broadly sympathetic. Yet she manages to give her such grace notes when it matters, such as the piano scene I mentioned before, or the look on her face when she learns that her friends are moving cause they're getting priced out. It may be my favorite turn by her, and I would like to see her be able to produce more movies of this kind.
The film ends with Percy and Maddie making a reconciliation after Maddie decides it's time to grow up and move on from Montauk, and it's a sweet ending, if maybe a little forced and pat. That's the trouble with trying to balance a movie like this, it kind of segments itself into a pattern of "here are the funny scenes," and "here are the serious scenes," so it's hard to find a conclusion that meets all the marks and ties it up nicely. But I really enjoyed No Hard Feelings and thought it was a fine multiplex movie, and the kind of film I hope studios invest more money into as the superhero blockbuster era seems to be slowly wilting away. Being messy is not necessarily a bad thing, as I think Maddie would attest to.