I slid into my seat at a New York screening of Don’t Worry Darling last week still dehydrated and sleep-deprived after dancing in the glittery pit of a Harry Styles concert the night before. Alas, the only cure for my plummeting serotonin levels was more Styles: I was there to see how the pop/rock star fares in his first major acting role after a bit part in 2017’s Dunkirk; curious about the much-advertised scene in which he watermelon sugars with Florence Pugh.
As a shameless fan, I came in with an open, charitable heart, absolutely rooting for Styles. As a culture writer, I was intrigued about the film everyone is talking, tweeting, meme-ing and gossiping about, and how Styles fits into it. Should I worry, darling, about Styles’s nascent acting career?
Don’t Worry Darling transports audiences to suspiciously superficial Victory, U.S.A., home of the shadowy Victory Project. It is at once a candy-coloured nightmare in which Pugh’s Alice, Wilde’s Bunny, and a merry band of housewives are gaslit into obedience, and a pleasant (for some) chauvinist commune in the desert, masterminded by a cult-y Chris Pine. The ladies are encouraged to get sauced, loll by the pool, and sex their one-dimensionally handsome husbands after they stroll in from a hard day at the office. Chief among them is Styles’s Jack, partner to Alice, who is too sharp for her own good.
That the husbands seem benign—as opposed to overtly cruel or abusive—proves key. “My early conversations with the cast were all about how the audience has to buy into the fantasy,” Wilde recently told Variety. Styles is an ideal salesman. (Although, whose fantasy is this 1950s world, exactly?) Playing dreamy is simple for a man who sells out arenas around the world and reduces fans almost to hyperventilation—the camera adores his wide blue eyes and “old-fashioned face,” as Dunkirk director Christopher Nolan once described it. The sight of him in a ruffly apron, botching a roast in the kitchen? Heaven. Sadly, Styles’s magnetic appeal is underused in the much-hyped sex scenes, which are too fleeting (I can recall a mere two, including the dining table cunnilingus) and not nearly boundary-pushing, delicious, or artful enough—but that’s not his fault.
There are people who will see this movie purely to behold Styles in something more than a music video in which he’s infatuated with a fish, and they likely won’t be disappointed. While he struggles in the scenes that demand fiery anger—perhaps it’s hard to tap into for the king of kindness?—Styles believably conveys aching and angst, just as he does in his music (most notably, in the the suite of crushing breakup songs on his second album, Fine Line). His inherent earnestness comes in handy for playing the most boyish and naive of Pine’s sheep. In one scene, Pine’s exceedingly creepy Frank becomes an ostensible puppet master, all but hypnotising Jack into a manic tap dance that feels like the psychotic answer to his retro-glitzy, black-and-white “Treat People with Kindness” video. Styles’s skills as a showman serve him well here—he really does “bring the pop to the cinema,” as he sings—even if I was still left wondering what in the ever-loving world was going on in the movie at large.
As Don’t Worry Darling went on, I questioned why an established, albeit embattled, actor like Shia LaBeouf would have been cast as Jack—a supporting role—in the first place. (His early departure informed one of the myriad controversies swirling around the film.) But then—no spoilers—the complexity of the role becomes suddenly clear. It’s challenging to dissect this part without giving away the central secret of the Victory Project, but as Wilde told Rolling Stone: “The entire story depended on the audience believing in Jack.” That’s quite a lot—maybe too much—to heap onto Styles’s shoulders after one tiny part in Dunkirk five years ago. The safer casting choice might have been to give him one of the lesser husband parts, but those of us who adore him know that Styles doesn’t err on the safe side, either.
