Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex is an emphatic letter from Gen X to Gen Z to stop being so weird about sex. I know Araki is technically a boomer; but his films ricocheted through Gen X in a way that other New Queer Cinema directors didn’t manage to sustain. From his breakthrough film in 1992 The Living End through to his “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy of The Doom Generation, Nowhere, and Totally Fucked Up Araki’s refusal to compromise on the kind of queer and “dangerous” stories he wanted to tell made him a maverick and one with damn good taste in music. So, in 2026 the now 66-year-old director is looking around the world he’s inhabiting and deciding it’s time to shake things up again. The black comedy and satire of I Want Your Sex is a finger pointed at a lot of topics – but the one that’s most prevalent is, “Why aren’t young people fucking?”
Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, a 23-year-old college graduate with zero idea of what he wants to do. When we first meet him, he’s dressed in a pink satin bra and panties outfit with blood streaming down his face and looking at the body of his employer and domination mistress Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) floating face down in her pool. Flash back to 9 and ½ weeks earlier (an amusing joke on the erotic thriller) and Elliot is telling his story as how he came to be calling 911 and wearing what he was to two detectives, Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville.
Elliot is mooching off his best friend and roommate, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) aimlessly looking for work after college. He applies to work in the studio of artist and provocateur Erika Tracy. Elliot in all his good-natured schlubiness is definitely not the candidate the contemporary art world would view as suitable. And yet, when he is interviewed by the perfectly predatory Erika she hires him on the spot. At first he wonders why working at her studio is so… well… empty. His main job is to chew gum and stuck it on a vagina shaped outline on a canvas. He makes friends with the fabulously clad Zap (Mason Gooding) who asks him about his trust fund. Elliot doesn’t have one. He doesn’t really have anything much. His girlfriend Minerva (Charlie XCX) is uninterested in him and she’d prefer studying for her medical degree than playing doctor with Elliot. His dream is to maybe one day start a podcast.
Erika changes everything. In her fetish-gear-as-work-attire she wrong-foots Elliot by telling him she thinks he’s been flirting inappropriately with her. He’s gobsmacked and tries to apologise and say that he wasn’t looking at her. “Why weren’t you looking at me?” Erika challenges. Eventually she decides that since he has a girlfriend it will be okay for her to fuck him. She’s noticed his need to please and his special skill for taking orders. From gum chewing employee to sub boy toy in a matter of a week or so was not the trajectory Elliot imagined. It’s also something he enthusiastically consents to.
Erika likes kinky sex, or at least that’s what her artwork implies. A kind of “feminist” version of Robert Mapplethorpe meets Penny Arcade/Annie Sprinkle meets Madonna in SEX mode. The fact that her work is drearily derivative and only minorly transgressive is part of Gregg Araki and screenwriter Kaley Sciortino (creator of Slutever) is part of the satire. Her relationship with Elliot is, to begin with, highly performative of S&M aesthetics. The fact that Elliot absolutely gets off on being degraded and told what to do is not performative. Erika has unlocked a simmering volcano of desire – perhaps even (like her) a sex addict in the making. There’s really nothing Elliot wouldn’t do for her, even be delivered as a present to her friend Yvette (an excellent and very French Roxane Mesquida). Yvette doesn’t want Elliot at all, but he’s okay with that. “I like being your toy” he tells Erika who is very aware of the fact.
Elliot is completely enthralled by this seemingly boundaryless exploration with Erika. He breaks up with Minerva, who is extremely happy (which reads as nonplussed) to do so, and he doesn’t take the warnings of Erika’s disapproving assistant Vikktor (Daveed Diggs) seriously that he’s just one in a long line of picked up and discarded playthings for the artist. He even suggests to Zap (who is openly gay and very promiscuous) that he might be queer too. “Have you ever sucked a dick?” Zap asks. Elliot demurs. “Then you’re straight.”
Yet, for all he is learning and loving about what bodies can do, there is a high and there is a low. As Erika’s new show approaches she cuts off the relationship. However, Erika is an addict and she calls Elliot telling him to bring someone over for a threesome. Apple is nervously keen to try it out, but when it gets to the nitty-gritty Erika humiliates Elliot in a way he thought wasn’t possible by excluding him. What’s worse is that when he is invited to join he can’t do the “just sex” with Apple which makes her feel unattractive and unwanted. Gen Z, in Araki and Sciortino’s estimation don’t know how to deal with being uncomfortable. And to be fair, they are a generation who judge you if you use a period in a text message or don’t end a statement with “lol”.
Elliot goes from having everything he wanted (perhaps except for an actual job and salary) to being homeless and jobless. He couch surfs at Zap’s but Zap is very, very, busy organising hook-ups and orgies and would like it very much if he wasn’t home for large periods of time. Broke, he goes to see Minerva and finds out that it wasn’t so much about her not liking sex, she just didn’t like it with him.
I Want Your Sex is a comic masterpiece with Araki sparing no one. The contemporary art world is far from groundbreaking, Erika is “over the hill” by her late 30s, Apple is fragile to the point where she “just can’t” with most things. And Elliot, poor Elliot, is a puppy who still isn’t housetrained. Detectives Zola and Zem look at him and ponder how he got involved in Erika’s world at all, and with her body disappearing from the side of the pool, how he could have managed to mastermind anything.
Will Gluck said of his film One Night Only which is set in a kind of ultra-conservative America where pre-marital sex is only allowed on one night during every year that originally he shot plenty of sex scenes but Gen Z and young Millennial test audiences didn’t like them. Every week or so on some social media site someone complains that “sex scenes are unnecessary and/or uncomfortable.” New Puritanism and prudery is everywhere. Gregg Araki doesn’t like it. In an interview with The Guardian, he said the following:
“I don’t want to say all of gen Z, but a certain number of gen Z live a sheltered life and don’t go out much,” he continues. “It’s like [they have] a fear of making a mistake or being uncomfortable or of having an experience that’s not wonderful. A lot of those experiences are not wonderful! The first time you ever get your heart broken or someone cheats on you, it really rocks your world. I just can’t imagine going through life without that experience.”
I Want Your Sex doesn’t pretend that sex and relationships don’t hurt – but without them how do you know what you want or need in your complete mind/body package? Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman have such ludicrously funny chemistry that it’s an absolute joy to watch Hoffman bark like a dog, or be a little sex piggy, because Erika is actually quite careful with him (at least at first) to make him feel safe and wanted.
So, take Uncle Gregg’s advice and go on some carnal adventures while you’re young and free or at least see movies about testing carnal limits. After all, he was right about Michael Stipe being gay (throwback to Totally Fucked Up). There’s always time to start a podcast.
I Want Your Sex played MIFF 2026 and is scheduled for Australian release on 27th August.
Director: Gregg Araki
Screenplay: Gregg Araki and Kaley Sciortino
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Daveed Diggs, Chase Sui Wonders, Charlie XCX
Cinematography: Tucker Korte
Production Design: Angelique Clark