Short, sweet, raunchy and often screamingly funny, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s audacious directorial debut “Don Jon’’ addresses a burning social issue: Can someone addicted to online porn actually forge a meaningful connection with a real-life girl?
Swaggering bartender Jon Martello — winningly played by Gordon-Levitt in his first rom-com since “(500) Days of Summer’’ — faithfully attends church and the gym. To his pals’ envy, Jon has his pick of the hottest one-night stands in Hackensack, NJ (where things have apparently improved since I worked there for 18 years).
This master of his own small universe is hardly the master of his own domain. To his parish priest, Jon dutifully confesses each week his sins not only with these women but with an endless supply of outrageously endowed and generally undressed women on his laptop.
Does this change when he meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), whose own assets are such that even Jon’s lunkhead dad (perfectly cast sitcom icon Tony Danza) looks up admiringly from his spaghetti and meatballs? Fugheddaboudit.
Jon may be willing to attend a college class to humor the girlfriend’s fantasies of his chances for upward mobility, or take her out to see an inane rom-com (with cameo-ing Anne Hathaway and Channing Tatum, who sure make a cute couple). He’ll even swear off porn, to her, but a few quick peeks on his cellphone doesn’t really count, right?
The cellphone pictures attract the attention of a classmate, the middle-aged Esther (Julianne Moore). Porn is not a deal-breaker for the more broad-minded Esther, who is worldly enough to gently teach our hero to stop objectifying women.
Originally titled “Don Jon’s Addiction’’ when it premiered at Sundance, Gordon-Levitt’s film, which he also wrote, handles a serious contemporary issue with wit and good sense. As well as tastefully as possible in a movie where there are many shots of the protagonist tossing used tissues into his wastebasket.
One of the most adventurous actors of his generation, Gordon-Levitt has a good sense of just how graphically he can depict Jon’s addiction and maintain the sympathy of both men and women.
He gets solid comic work out of Johansson and the more much skillful Moore, both allowed to flesh out characters who could easily have come across purely as male fantasies.
Gordon-Levitt’s maternal grandfather, as it happens, directed the Doris Day-Rock Hudson rom-com classic “Pillow Talk,’’ which in its way is as much a time capsule of its early ’60s era as “Don Jon’’ is of our own time. The two films would sure make a delightful double feature.