Getting laid is a bitch for most people. For San Francisco poet and journalist Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes), it's damn near impossible. Since he contracted polio at age six, O'Brien has spent all but a few hours a day in an iron lung. Now, just two years shy of being a 40-year-old virgin, he decides to see a sex surrogate.
What Hollywood hack makes this stuff up? As it turns out, no one. The Sessions, based on O'Brien's experiences while living in Berkeley in 1988, is the stuff of real life. If you're thinking, "How depressing," snap out of it. Writer-director Ben Lewin, drawing on O'Brien's essay "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate" (published in 1990), has crafted an exhilarating gift of a movie that's funny, touching and vital. And Hawkes (Winter's Bone, Deadwood) does the kind of acting that awards were invented for. Having learned to twist his body, use a mouth stick to dial a phone and type, and suggest the sheer effort it took for O'Brien to simply
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