Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 49% of 102 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5/10. The website's consensus reads: "A series of promising ideas lost in scattershot execution, Sharp Stick stands as a disappointing setback for writer-director Lena Dunham." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 53 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.
In a Sundance review for Time magazine, Stephanie Zacharek praised Lena Dunham's willingness to depict a woman's messy, flawed sexual experiences, writing, "This is a film made with tenderness, more an exploration than a definitive statement, and a reminder that awkward sex isn't necessarily bad sex: if anything, it's the ultimate proof of our bewildering, imperfect humanness." Zacharek also praised the sincerity of the film in its depiction of finding love in "a world where the Internet is better at providing the illusion of interconnectedness than it is at actually connecting us". For RogerEbert.com, Tomris Laffly awarded Sharp Stick three out of four stars, writing that Dunham "unearths a refreshing amount of humor, honesty, and sincerity" in the film. Laffly also described Kristine Froseth's lead performance as "extraordinary".
In The New Yorker, Richard Brody complimented the detail and perceptiveness with which Dunham fashioned the film's sex scenes, but complained that "the parts of the film involving Sarah Jo's quest of sexual experience are rushed, breezed by, diminished—as is the interpersonal, emotional part that inevitably comes into play". For The Washington Post, Ann Hornaday praised the film's "candor" and sense of humor, but criticized Sarah Jo's characterization, describing her as "a naif so innocent and so unworldly that she feels less like a fully realized human than a symbol".
Hornaday's sentiment was echoed by several negative reviews of Sharp Stick. In The Hollywood Reporter, Jourdain Searles questioned the reasoning behind Sarah Jo's "troubling" characterization:
What is the significance of Sarah Jo being this way? Yes, she's sexually repressed, but how can she be this naive considering the sexual openness of her mother and sister? How did she manage to glean nothing from her 26 years on Earth? It doesn't help matters that Froseth — who was roughly the age of her character at the time of filming — looks much younger than she is, and the costume choices push her uncomfortably into fetish object territory.
Adrian Horton of The Guardian gave the film two out of five stars, stating that the film's more "interesting, immersive material" becomes "torpedoed by Dunham's decision, refracted by Froseth's odd performance, to write Sarah Jo as more sexual alien than curious person". In The New York Times, Amy Nicholson described scenes involving Sarah Jo's sexual experimentation as "too humorless for satire and too artificial to support the film's eventual, deluded attempt to shift into a somewhat sincere coming-of-age tale". Dana Stevens of Slate referred to such scenes "disturbing", writing, "The wide-eyed enthusiasm with which Sarah Jo approaches this project is meant, I think, to be whimsically endearing; instead, I worried for her safety every time a stranger appeared at the door." Stevens also criticized the film's approach to contrasting Sarah Jo with her adopted sister, the "twerking, boy-crazy" Treina, played by Taylour Paige, calling their dynamic "a pure story contrivance—and one that, given the fact Sarah Jo is white and Treina black, carries with it racial implications that the script barrels obliviously past".
Additionally, for InsideHook, Charles Bramesco scrutinized the "traditionalism" of Dunham's decision to write a sexually adventurous character who ultimately ends up "back into the arms of the one genuine date she actually made a connection with".
