Sleeping With Other People

Director: Leslye Headland
Screenwriters: Leslye Headland

Institute History

  • 2015 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Years after impulsively losing their virginity to each other in college, Lainey (Alison Brie) and Jake (Jason Sudeikis) meet at a support group in New York ("What’s a nice girl like you doing at a sex addicts meeting?"). A spark resurfaces, but they’ve walked this road before. Abject failures in romance who lead lives of serial infidelity and self-sabotage, they agree to a platonic friendship to mutually support their recovery—and what’s more supportive than teaching your friend proper self-stimulation? Can love bloom while you're sleeping with other people?

Leslye Headland’s hysterical follow-up to Bachelorette upends the romantic comedy genre by putting love in the hands of self-avowed sluts. She brings intelligence, cinematic flair, and subversive wit to this screwball romp about soul mates in denial of their coupledom—an ironic homage to the "men and women can’t be friends" theorem of When Harry Met Sally. Lainey and Jake appear good-natured, even charming, but their characters are deeper, truthful, with darker, more damaged cores. Headland takes the romantic lacquer off the romantic comedy but leaves the heart intact. —J.N.

— John Nein

Screening Details

Credits

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