Movies About Porn Shouldn't Be This Boring

'About Cherry' represents yet another failed attempt to nail the skin-flick industry in the digital age.

About Cherry is yet another failed attempt to nail what's interesting about modern flesh films.

IFC Films

Does mainstream film still have anything interesting to say about porn? You'd think so, if judging by the number of movies made about it in recent years.

A sampling. In the Shock-Us-With-Porn's-Dangerous-Quotidian-Baseness Department, we have Rated X (2000), Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy (2001), Wonderland (2003), The Girl Next Door (2004), and Inside Deep Throat (2005). In the Saucy-"It's-a-Living"-Ironies-From-the-XXX-Backstage Department, we have Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) and Finding Bliss (2009), not to mention corollary fare like the recent For a Good Time, Call ... (2012) and odd fantasias like Orgazmo (1997). And any psychic nuances left unstroked might yet be found in two upcoming biopics about Deep Throat's Linda Lovelace, Inferno and Lovelace.

Films about porn that get at deeper truths, though, are scarce. P.T. Anderson's memorable Boogie Nights (1997) leaps to mind, but it's worth noting that it took years for Anderson to digest the zeitgeist of '70s/'80s wide-screen wantonness. And the picture's pathos really rested on pitifully endearing characters like John C. Reilly's sad-eyed hanger-on Reed Rothchild and Heather Graham's crazily blissed-out Rollergirl. You might say it was a period-pinpointing, outsider-group portrait dressed as (or undressed as) a movie about porn.

Maybe it will take a decade or two before our own age's digital down and dirty gets its definitive take. The Internet is fast, but cultural epiphany won't be rushed. That, anyway, is what's suggested by the disappointing new feature About Cherry, which sees theatrical release this week.

Leading up to its festival debut earlier this year, the art-house set had been practically panting over the film's bona fides. Cowritten by literary entrepreneur Stephen Elliott, founder of therumpus.net, and porn star Lorelei Lee, About Cherry was shot partly at San Francisco's Kink.com studios, a former armory building that serves as a veritable 250,000-square-foot skin-flick Cinecitta. Featuring talent blended from Lee's colleagues and indie-film lights like James Franco, Lili Taylor, and former Rollergirl herself, Graham, it looked poised to be a Boogie Nights for our time, tricking out a character study as bona-fide authentic gawk at the Prurient States of America. Franco's pursuit of a parallel documentary project about Kink.com further fueled the speculative fires.

Sadly, though, for all its location cred, Cherry is, of all things, dramatically limp—turgid only in dialogue and acting. It has nothing new to say about body and soul's eternally uneasy symbiosis, or about love and friendship, or even about the recently over-discussed if not untrue pornification of America. The film might have aspired to originality, if not quality, as bold as its PR if it had paid more heed to its surroundings. Instead, it murmured its safe word and meandered off into a melodramatic mediocrity.

Cherry is the nom de paywall of one Angelina (former Abercrombie and Fitch model and Gossip Girl guest star Ashley Hinshaw), who flees her alcoholic, manipulative mother Phyllis (Taylor), Phyllis's menacing boyfriend, and an irritating, exploitative wannabe rocker amour in Long Beach for the bright red lights of San Francisco. Waiting tables at a strip club, she's drawn to the bigger bucks and illicit thrills of porn at a Kink.com-like studio, which is here a company called Bod. Angelina catches the eye of both a rich coke-head lawyer, Frances (Franco), and porn-director Margaret (Graham). While both of them try to flatter Angelina out of her clothes and inhibitions, she ignores her old chum Andrew (Dev Patel, playing somewhat coy counterpart to his Anwar character in the British TV series Skins), who tries to sort out both his sexual orientation and his feelings for Angelina.

Hinshaw is a sexy, endearing blend of savvy and vulnerable. And Graham, with her preternaturally large eyes, is charmingly seductive in Margaret's distinctively earnest-yet-calculating way. But Franco's talents are wasted here on the baldly scripted Frances, a sallow-looking, hypocritical, art-loving boy-man trying to escape his overbearing museum-board doyenne of a mother. Taylor too is put to poor use in a thinly drawn caricature of an irresponsible mum. And the screenplay's bungled attempt at sophisticated friend/lover libido logic thwarts the talented Patel as he attempts to move beyond his status as Angela's hapless friend without benefits.

To its credit, About Cherry avoids the involving but predictable and shrill moralizing of old-school, girl-run-amok pictures such as Paul Schraeder's Hardcore (1979) and Bob Fosse's Star 80 (1983). The film doesn't rule out the possibility that exotic sex, exhibitionism, and voyeurism can be, of all things, fun, even as the story normalizes the new porn industrial complex's bureaucracy, complete with paperwork-laden hiring interviews, crabby java-slurping directors, and producers trying to boost productivity. Never mind the naughty nurse and dominatrix-cop setups of Cherry's scenes—one can almost imagine Steve Carrel as a buffoon version of Kink.com's founder Peter Acworth in a TV sitcom called Deep Office.

But for all its contemporary revelatory pretensions, About Cherry stumbles over the time-honored tripwires of a gawky plot and tired performances, as though porn-acting standards had lowered the indie high bar instead of being elevated by it. The same holds true for the writing, which sounds like it should be part of a bad porn setup even when it's part of the framing story:

Angelina: [eats some fruit the morning after a night of lovemaking] This is amazing.

Margaret: Yeah, I got it at the farmer's market. You should come with me sometime. It's so fun.

Angelina: Mm, I like it when you pick the fruit. You always pick better fruit than I do.

Margaret: [Adoring, then knowing, gaze] It's true. [The two of them giggle together girlishly.]

Cherry's not sure whether it wants to be a keyhole peep into a forbidden world, a warning tale about a vulnerable ingénue, a bildungsroman, or yet another verité-ish expose about an America gone to seed. If it is intended to shock in its casual frankness, it's too late to the game. Any naïve parent who has tried, say, to Google the lyrics to the children's song "Little Brown Jug" has no doubt come away from their laptop with an eyeful surpassing anything Elliott, dressing his X up as R, will show you here.

There are hints of camp and desensitizing insider snark—more than a soupcon of Showgirls (1995) in the Bod dressing-room banter. But if sly irony is intended, the characters are neither cartoonish enough nor the stakes high enough (Will she make $800 in a day if she signs on to a boy-girl flick? Will she? Will she?), for that to be sustained either.

So how did a film so intent on being eye-opening get so drab and snoozy? There are, after all, new aspects of the porn world to be considered. In a Huffington Post interview in April, responding particularly to a group called War on Illegal Pornography, director and co-scripter Elliott pushed his talking points regarding sexual identity politics and porn as enlightenment.

"I am a former sex worker, so arguments like the one this group is making are very personal to me. When you talk about S&M promoting rape and abuse, that is a direct assault on my sexuality. ....

"But more importantly, Kink is extremely respectful of its workers, more so than most pornography companies. There are women directors, workers get benefits and, even though it doesn't look like it on camera, boundaries are openly discussed and never, ever pushed at Kink. The thing about porn is it's very empowering. You set all of the rules and the rules are absolutely followed. You say, 'this is what you can and cannot do to my body.' That is a very powerful thing."

While the articulate Elliott may be more persuasive than, for instance, Larry Flynt, the film downplays the S&M angles of Kink.com. Beyond a couple vague conversational references to playing "top" or "bottom," scripters Elliott and Lee don't go there. And in a year when the Fifty Shades trilogy tops the best-seller list, Cherry's Bod experiences won't strike viewers as terribly outlandish. The roughest sex we witness is non-Bod, between Graham and her estranged realty-broker lover, and even that encounter is mostly in tasteful silhouette and far less interesting than their apartment's fabulous view.

Consider the kind of script that might be written about the themes Elliott mentioned to HuffPo: the fact that the stars of Device Bondage and Men in Pain have better job security and benefits than do your local grocery checkout clerks or, for that matter, the adjunct lecturer teaching your kid's "Sex and Society" course at Big State U. There's surely true obscenity—though where exactly it lurks is interestingly ambiguous—when a company that whips and penetrates its employees may have more progressive HR practices than one that merely asks them to stock shelves.

We might have to wait a while for that movie, though. Maybe by 2030, we'll have a better idea what America's lustonomics in 2012 were all about.