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This review originally ran following the film’s world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Lena Dunham’s sophomore feature, “Sharp Stick,” opens with Taylour Paige doing a TikTok dance over a trap beat. In an ordinary era, this sequence might promptly set the entire auditorium abuzz at the film’s premiere: Dunham rubbing it in the faces of critics who have pestered her over lack of diversity throughout six seasons of her acclaimed HBO series, “Girls.” But this isn’t an ordinary era, as Covid-19 has for more than two years moved so much online.

After that opener, Dunham immediately retreats to the familiar territory of a nuclear family with two sisters and a single mother, a dynamic not foreign to those who saw her 2010 debut “Tiny Furniture.” As Paige’s Treina rehearses her moves, her sister, Sarah Jo, meekly holds the camera phone as their libertine, five-time-divorced mother,...

[Editor’s note: The following story contains light spoilers for “Sharp Stick.”]

There’s been a lot of panic lately about whether or not Gen Z is having enough sex. Based on a few studies that first appeared in 2016, the handwringing headlines include BuzzFeed declaring Gen Z Is Having Less Sex Than Previous Generations, Newsweek asking What’s Driving Gen Z’s Aversion to Sex?, and The Guardian dubbing it Gen Z’s Sex Recession.

Gen Z encompasses those born between 1996 and 2012, making the youngest Zoomers 10 and the oldest 26 years old, which also means that the evolving reasons for this supposed downturn are mostly still conjecture. The Guardian suggests it’s a good thing, with a growing awareness around consent leading to a “quality over quantity” attitude. One study found a correlation between reduced alcohol consumption and reduced casual sex. Others have blamed helicopter parents.

As the unofficial documentarian of Millennial sexuality, especially as it pertained to young women with her hit HBO show “Girls,...

For a decade, Lena Dunham has kept more than busy, executive producing TV series like “Camping” and “Generation” and putting out her memoir. Yet she’s been notably selective about her main slate of projects, and “Sharp Stick,” which premiered tonight at the Sundance Film Festival, is her third major act. The first was “Tiny Furniture,” the 2010 movie that launched her, and it was a gem: the portrait of a wayward young New York striver, played by Dunham, told on an unusual level of lacerating honesty. When I saw it I thought: There’s something about how this filmmaker views her lead character — with open eyes, showing us her dreams but also, in close-up, all her flaws — that cuts against the grain not just of Hollywood but of so much indie-film piety.

Dunham’s second act was “Girls,” and that was a one-series revolution: not the first HBO show to feel “like a movie,...