SCARLETT JOHANSSON AND JOSEPH GORDON-LEVIT IN DON JON

Jokey message movie is Gordon-Levitt's debut

In the 32-year-old Joseph Gordon-Levitt's indeed, as the poster says, bold and confident directorial debut, which he wrote and stars in, he works fluently in stereotypes, clichés, schticks, and repetition. And laughs. His hero, who his buddies call "the Don," is a young working-class New Jersey Italo-American who keeps things real simple. He often eats with his mother Monica, father Jon Sr., and sister Angela (Glenne Headly, Tony Danza, and Brie Larson), but has his own apartment, which he enjoys cleaning himself. He likes hanging out with his two best pals Bobby and Danny (Bob Brown and Jeremy Luke) at the bar where he works, rating the chicks on a scale of one to ten, picking up the best, making out with her on the couch, and taking them home for sex. He loves family and he loves his local Catholic church, which he attends with them -- each shot of them in a row in the pew shifting fast to his weekly confession, when he admits his sex out of wedlock and his masturbation with porn and gets his Hail Marys and Lord's Prayers. The porn: that he loves especially, and this R Rated movie will show you many glimpses of it and give you lots of blunt sex talk in Jon's (Gordon Levitt's) frequent voiceovers.

This movie is notable for its clarity, simplicity, bluntness, and vulgarity. It's also sweet, and almost naively simple and uplifting in its message. It says if you want to have good sex, you must learn to lose yourself totally in the other person.

At the bar one night Jon picks up a babe who blows the guys away, a "dime," a perfect ten, Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a voluptuous bleach-blonde Jewish girl. Johansson plays Barbara as just as simple and iconic a Jersey cliché as Jon and everybody else. With Barbara, things go further. It's not just a lay. They keep going out, and she doesn't put out at first, he has to wait. When his patience is rewarded, he becomes so interested he brings her to meet his family, and his parents are very happy, Jon Sr. impressed that her boobs are real, his mother ecstatic that Jon's settling down. But after Jon has sex with this babe, no matter how good it is, every time he's still horny. So he sneaks away to jack off with his online porn. Immediately she catches him and is outraged and insulted. He promises to stop. But of course he doesn't. And she insists he must not lie to him. And of course he does.

Eventually when Jon's not in the room Barbara looks up his browsing "history" on his laptop and sees he's surfed over 40 porn sites, on just that one day! He loves his porn. All he goes to on the Internet is porn. He's been lying to her, and she forbade him to lie. It's over. They break up.

Barbara says all she asked of Jon was one thing. But in retrospect he realizes she's asked for a lot of things.Notably, she told him he could not clean his own apartment any more. She found that humiliating. She won't even allow him to shop for cleaning supplies when she's at the store with him. But this is no real surprise. She wanted him to do everything her way. She was a "princess" -- the word is used only once, and Gordon-Levitt refrains from the word "Jewish," but we know what he means.

While they were dating Barbara also commanded Jon to take an evening class, and he's been obeying. And that's where he meets Esther (Julianne Moore), an older woman who's weeping when he first sees her, but who approaches him persistently, a little annoyingly, also flatteringly. Eventually they have sex in a car. With her, he shares what has happened with Barbara, and the porn issue.

Esther is fully understanding. She knows all men use porn, and greatly sympathizes how when he tries to do without it he winds up not having an orgasm for a week. This is when they have great sex at his place, and she teaches him about how to have really fulfilling sex he must learn to lose himself completely in the other person when he does so.

Don Jon's tongue-in-cheek stereotyping doesn't mean it contains a cool or ironic world view. In fact Esther, who wants sex but can't give love now because she's recently lost her husband and son in a tragic accident, can be taken very straight.

The simplicity extends to all the repetitions, the ritual family dinners, with Monica staring into her handheld device (till that one moment when she finally speaks, to condemn Barbara); the church and confession and penance sessions; the porno sessions, with the Kleenex thrown with a click into the waste basket to show the job has been done; the prance down the health club hallway to the weight room and the weight lifting, reciting phrases from the Lord's Prayer as he pumps the iron.

In its comic stereotyping and repetitions Don Jon has something in common with classic Fifties or early Sixties film comedies, maybe Italian ones -- with the crude language and sexual explicitness of the present era added. This is fine. Still, it's a bit too simple to be a really good movie. But it's also a bit too assured not to be a distinctive beginning for Gordon-Levitt. He was a child actor. He became known through the TV show "3rd Rock from the Sun." He went on to be in remarkably edgy and original films like Manic, Latter Days, Mysterious Skin, Brick and The Lookout, all unexpected and smart. He played a different kind of role in Stop-Loss; then he caught more and different eyes with the cute, original rom-coms (500) Days of Summer and 50-50. After G.I. Joe, he played the weirdly sleazy titular character in Hesher. Since then he has seamlessly slid into the "big time," so to speak, with roles in Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, and -- edgy again, and cool, but higher profile, in Brick director Rian Johnson's much admired Looper. There is an admirable balance and range in what he has done. If you haven't been following Joseph Gordon-Levitt, it's high time you started catching up.

Being an actor, Joe makes good use of actors in Don Jon. Even if she is a stereotype, Johansson is delicious as the crudely luscious Jewish princess. Tony Danza is a nice piece of casting. Julianne Moore, as usual, is good. Everything else being bright and shiny, the dimmer, off-center evening school scenes are the most different and interesting, setting a new mood that opens the way for Jon's revelations. Esther represents a different, more adult and nuanced world that will help him become more of a real human being. In another film, Gordon-Leavitt may take the risk of starting out as one. Or, he may like working with broad satire. Time will tell, but judging from the varied career he has had up to now, it's certain he'll be trying new and different things and growing as he moves on. So Don Jon's simplistic aspects don't seem a worry, but probably a good opening strategy in the career chess game Joe has played so well up to now.

Don Jon, 90 mins., debuted at Sundance, and opened in the US 27 Sept. 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.