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Jennifer Lawrence, like Margot Robbie and others before her, has taken her experience and standing in Hollywood and built on it by starting a production company with a remit to promote female led films. Robbie’s company, LuckyChap Entertainment, made I, Tonya, Birds of Prey and Promising Young Woman and Lawrence’s Excellent Cadaver has so far given us PTSD drama Causeway, Bread & Roses, a documentary about women living under the Taliban in Afghanistan, and this.

No Hard Feelings is essentially an American Pie style bawdy sex comedy, which might seem like an odd choice for Lawrence. It’s twenty plus years since the original American Pie trilogy and it has to be said that the world has moved on. Also, while it hasn’t harmed the careers of most of the women involved, it’s fair say that none of them were already at the top of their careers when they made those films.

There are certainly parts of No Hard Feelings, a film where Lawrence’s 32 year old Maddie is paid by a pair of helicopter parents to take the virginity of their 19 year old son before he goes off to Princeton, that do play out like a teenage boys fantasy. There is also a moment where Lawrence appears totally naked. Somehow though the movie does largely reframe these elements and succeeds in turning some of the conventions of this significantly problematic type of film on their head.

Let’s get into the nudity first. I did consider naming this review ‘Jennifer Lawrence Naked’, following the thousands and thousands of views I got for my piece on 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service because it included the words ‘Swedish actress Hanna Alström’s naked butt’. (I’d like to think that all of those people who found my website after entering that search string only to discover that I was decrying the sexism of the film, questioned their attitudes and found a new enlightenment.) There’d have been little point in that title though because nearly every other online piece is also discussing this part of this movie so I’m not sure I’d have got the traffic.

Here’s my take on it. I don’t think it was strictly necessary and it isn’t balanced because the male nudity in the film is not taken to the same extent. It is a funny scene though and it has more impact because of how far it goes. It is also done entirely on Lawrence’s terms as well as she is the producer of this thing. There is also no denying that the moment in question is narratively one of proper female empowerment where a woman is not allowing herself to be diminished or taken advantage of because of her dressed down state. It isn’t exploitation.

Another important aspect of the whole film is that this is not actually a fantasy for the teenage boy at the centre of it; it is more of a nightmare. When Maddie first comes on to the young man, he is actually intimidated and threatened and as the truth of the situation comes into question (he is not aware of his parents’ misjudged machinations) it all becomes increasingly unsettling for him. There are moments of real sweetness in the story as well and both leads are fully rounded characters. Porky’s this is not.

More than anything though, what sets this apart from the majority of similar films is that it almost entirely comes from the woman’s point of view. Imagine that first American Pie movie if it centred on Stifler’s Mom. The age difference is clearly a factor here, as it was there, and the story plays with ideas about how being a ‘cougar’ is somehow okay when having the genders the other way around with a thirty something man trying to seduce a teenage girl would absolutely not be. In fact Maddie might as well be a generation older in relation to how she fits in with an adolescent crowd and there is some nice humour around this.

No Hard Feelings does largely land the comedy. There are some slapstick set pieces but mostly it is the one liners that raise the laughs and Lawrence is a strong comedy performer, as anyone who has ever seen her interviewed will know. It isn’t quite as shocking as I suspect it wants to be but it rightly has to work with modern sensibilities which it generally does. At its heart it is a nice tale of an unlikely friendship developing where every circumstance would suggest it shouldn’t. It is also amusing to see Matthew Broderick as the father, talking about his own wayward youth, in what I feel is not the only reference to Ferris Bueller.

No Hard Feelings has not landed in the cinematic landscape, or redefined women in the genre, as strongly as something like Booksmart or indeed Promising Young Woman (both of which were written and directed by female filmmakers – which this was not) but if Jennifer Lawrence and her team what to keep making films that push contemporary boundaries and steer away from current expectations, then great.