Sleeping With Other People’ is trying for sex-forward edginess, but mostly fails to engage
A modern-day Harry and Sally spin around each other, in very close orbit, in “Sleeping With Other People.â€
Played by Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, they’re New Yorkers who take their tortured sweet time accepting the truth that they belong together. It’s a standard rom-com contrivance, stretched past the breaking point by writer-director Leslye Headland’s resolve to inject the genre with a sex-forward edginess.
Headland (“Bacheloretteâ€) writes dialogue that alternates between sitcom zingers and plot mechanics posing as insights. Though the leads lend charm and comic timing to the unpersuasive material, it would take a ground-up rewrite to make the fate of their characters matter.
A dormitory meet-cute sets the credulity-defying tone. For starters, there’s Sudeikis’ boy-band bangs. The encounter is a virginity-vanquishing one for his Jake and Brie’s Lainey, and it inexplicably sends them on their separate ways until they meet cute again, 12 years later.
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By this point they’re serial cheaters, determined not to do unto each other as they’ve done unto everyone else they’ve dated. Their self-imposed stint as besties, albeit the sort who devise a safe word to defuse sexual tension, is as unconvincing as the movie’s quirky posturing, all while in desperate pursuit of a wholly conventional — and predictable — outcome.
Along the way we get mildly diverting comic set pieces: Lainey is adorable on Ecstasy; Jake delivers an exuberant lesson in masturbation. Although Natasha Lyonne is utterly wasted, other members of the supporting cast breathe what life they can into the yakfest. A briefly seen Adam Brody is nimbly droll, and Amanda Peet suggests a more grounded, compelling story. In the thinly conceived role of the man whom Lainey loves too much, Adam Scott exerts a dark tug beneath the cartoonishness.
Brie and Sudeikis play smoothly off each other without quite generating chemistry beyond one especially tender moment. It’s a rare glimpse of emotion in a comedy contraption whose gears grind endlessly but never engage.
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‘Sleeping With Other People’
MPAA rating: R for strong sexual content, language including sexual references, drug use
Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes
Playing: In limited release
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