Film

“All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun,” wrote Jean-Luc Godard. Sex Drive has both, plus raunch, a 1969 hot-red-orange GTO and Seth Green as a sarcastic Amish farmer. Does that make it a better movie than Breathless? Not quite. But as far as teen-devirginizing comedies go, Sex Drive feels extremely generous. The spirit is less sweaty and Apatovian, more Farrelly brothers or, better yet, Savage Steve Holland, the 1980s quirkster whose One Crazy Summer and Better Off Dead put a sweet-natured spin on Porky’s that remains fondly remembered, if not influential.

Our gentle, Cusackian hero, Ian (Zuckerman), a Chicago suburbanite, has a fearsome older brother, Rex (James Marsden), but an unusually confident best friend, Lance (Duke), who encourages him to pursue an IM crush in Tennessee. Piling into Rex’s beloved muscle car, Ian and Lance can’t help but brake for Felicia (Crew, winningly snide), Ian’s gothy almost-GF. Complications ensue—jail time, violent hicks, the raging Rex—and few are new, but genial director-cowriter Sean Anders has a classically proportioned experience in mind, one that yields sly and lowbrow laughs alike. Just to reiterate: Look at that title, know what you’re getting into. But if you’re game, the ride’s a smooth one.