“No Hard Feelings” opens with a joke about class and never stops telling it. Jennifer Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, a 32-year-old Uber driver and bartender in Montauk, New York, who is about to lose the house her mother left her. She owes property taxes. Her car is being repossessed. Bankruptcy is at the door.
Then she finds a Craigslist ad. Alison and Laird Becker, a wealthy couple, want someone to date their 19-year-old son Percy before he leaves for Princeton. The pay is a Buick Regal.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
A Buick Regal for a Summer
That is the whole engine of the film, and it is a good one. Maddie needs a car to work. The Beckers need their son to become a different person. Gene Stupnitsky directs from a script he wrote with John Phillips, and the screenplay keeps the transaction in plain sight. Nobody in “No Hard Feelings” pretends this is romance. It is a job with a car as the wage.
Lawrence, who also produced, plays Maddie without vanity. She is broke, she is mean when she needs to be, and she is not sorry about the arrangement until the movie decides she should be.
Percy Maces Her in the Shelter
The first seduction attempt happens at the animal shelter where Percy volunteers. Andrew Barth Feldman plays Percy as a kid who has read the room and left it. When Maddie offers him a ride home, he thinks she is trying to kidnap him. He maces her.
That scene sets the terms. Percy is not a prize waiting to be unlocked. He is a person with instincts, and some of them are correct. The film’s best running joke is that the awkward one keeps being right.
Skinny Dipping and the Stolen Clothes
They go to a bar, then to the beach. Drunken teenagers steal their clothes while they swim. Maddie, naked, attacks them. Percy is frightened and refuses to have sex with her. When she tries to leave with his clothes, he jumps on her car, also naked, and they outrun the police.
It is the film’s loudest set piece, and it works because the humiliation lands on both of them. Later, back at her house, Percy develops an anxiety rash. Maddie takes care of him instead.
Two People Who Skipped Prom
The middle stretch is the part worth keeping. Maddie and Percy keep dating, share more, and become friends. She tells him her father was cheating on his wife and family in New York City with her mother, that he paid her off with cash and the house. Neither of them went to prom. So they stage one — a fancy dinner where Percy plays “Maneater” on the piano.
Feldman’s piano number is the film’s one moment of unguarded joy, and it belongs to him, not to Lawrence.
Natalie and the Princeton Party
After dinner, Percy runs into a school acquaintance, Natalie, who invites him to a Princeton orientation party. This is where the movie’s machinery starts to show. The premise requires Percy to have a life that does not include Maddie, and the script needs a reason for that life to arrive on schedule.
| Character | Actor | Function in the plot |
|---|---|---|
| Maddie Barker | Jennifer Lawrence | Hired by the Beckers; needs the Buick |
| Percy Becker | Andrew Barth Feldman | The introverted son bound for Princeton |
| Allison Becker | Laura Benanti | Percy’s mother; placed the ad |
| Laird Becker | Matthew Broderick | Percy’s father; placed the ad |
| Sara | Natalie Morales | In Maddie’s orbit |
| Jim | Scott MacArthur | In Maddie’s orbit |
The supporting cast — Benanti, Broderick, Morales, MacArthur, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Kyle Mooney, Hasan Minhaj — is stacked and mostly underused. Broderick and Benanti get the joke of parents who think a car can fix a childhood. Moss-Bachrach and Mooney get less.
The Bidding War and the Box Office
Sony Pictures Releasing and Columbia Pictures won a bidding war for the project in October 2021, beating Apple Original Films, Netflix and Universal Pictures. Filming ran in Nassau County locations from late September to November 2022. The film opened in the United States on June 23, 2023, and grossed over $87 million worldwide against a $45 million budget.
The awards followed the star, not the movie. Lawrence was nominated for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical at the 81st Golden Globe Awards and won Comedy Movie Star of the Year at the 49th People’s Choice Awards. “No Hard Feelings” was nominated for Best Comedy at the 29th Critics’ Choice Awards.
What the Film Actually Believes
The comedy is frank about sex in a way studio films rarely are, and Lawrence is the reason it holds. She plays the desperation straight. The problem is that “No Hard Feelings” cannot decide whether it is a farce about a transaction or a sweet story about two lonely people, so it does both and lets the farce carry the first half and the sweetness carry the second.
The age gap is the film’s central provocation, and it never quite earns the seriousness it wants. Percy’s anxiety rash, his macing of Maddie, his refusal at the beach — these are played for laughs, then the movie asks us to care about his feelings. It mostly gets away with it because Feldman is good and because the script, by Phillips and Stupnitsky, keeps Percy’s dignity intact even when the plot does not.
What stays with you is the economics. A house, a car, a son, a summer. Everyone in “No Hard Feelings” is buying something, and the film knows it.
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