‘I Love Dick’ takes provocative, funny approach to female desire

Some TV shows claim to give their viewers a lot to think about, but few ever do it as well as “I Love Dick,” Sarah Gubbins and Jill Soloway’s perplexing, beautifully told, often enthrallingly provocative exploration of female desire in a man’s world.

Its eight fast episodes can press nearly every button you’ve got, constantly asking (at times even demanding) that you reconsider the ways in which a story about a woman gets told. Even when it appears to be told from her point of view, it’s never entirely hers.

Adapted from a 1997 memoir/novel hybrid by Chris Kraus that slowly ascended from obscure publishing sensation to cult classic, “I Love Dick” (now streaming on Amazon) is an obliquely feminist work that tries to meet viewers wherever they are along the gender divide, from those who are already familiar with the concept of “the female gaze” (I’d mansplain it to you, but maybe not right now) to those who still crinkle their noses at almost any mention of the word feminism.

Littered with impetuous female and male characters who act on some of their worst sexual and artistic impulses, “I Love Dick” shares both the wry tone and challenging empathy of Soloway’s hit series “Transparent.” In that show, an initial obstacle for viewers was the cruddy selfishness displayed by the adult children of a father who has revealed his transgender nature and intention to live as a woman.

In “I Love Dick,” Kathryn Hahn stars as Chris, an independent filmmaker. Chris is delivering her historical theorist husband, Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), to the remote West Texas town of Marfa. Sylvere has been granted a yearlong fellowship at the Marfa Institute to work on his next book, which he says is “about the Holocaust — there’s something new afoot.”

On their first day in Marfa, Chris receives devastating news: The film she intended to premiere at an Italian festival has been booted from the lineup because she failed to secure the rights to a song featured in it. Enraged, Chris nevertheless accompanies her husband to a reception, where she meets the institute’s director, Dick Jarrett (Kevin Bacon), a renowned postmodernist sculptor whose work has received every possible accolade — there are no more genius grants left to bestow on him.

All of Marfa, it seems, is under Dick’s sway; women and men seem to vibrate in his presence as he moseys into town on horseback, every weathered crease on his face hinting at another reserve of brilliance. Chris and Sylvere, the typically provincial New Yorkers who’ve left their element and are now caught up in their own pretensions, invite Dick to dinner. Unloading her woes, Chris is speechless when Dick tells her that her movie sounds dull. “Women don’t make good films,” he says, “because they have to work from behind their oppression.”

Livid and lustful, Chris bangs out a draft of a letter to Dick that night on her laptop, in which she imagines the details of a torrid love affair with him. She reads the letter aloud to Sylvere, which turns him on; without knowing it, Dick has rekindled the couple’s sex life.

You’d think it could just stop there, but the mess only gets messier. When Chris asks Dick if she can stay on in Marfa and audit some of his lectures, he brushes her off again — which compels her to write more hot-’n’-bothered letters to him, filled with pent-up frustration. (Sample: “I was born into a world that presumes there is something grotesque, unspeakable about female desire. But now all I want is to be undignified, to trash myself. I want to be a female monster.”)

Not so long ago, a woman like Chris would have been portrayed as a dangerously fixated stalker (think of what Glenn Close did to the bunny in 1987’s “Fatal Attraction”) rather than an expressive protagonist. “I Love Dick” flips the script.

In other hands, “I Love Dick” could be too much to take, but Gubbins, Soloway and the show’s writers are satisfyingly skeptical of intellectualism, art, the Marfa milieu and the self-absorption that consumes their characters. It’s one of those shows in which you don’t root for anyone’s happiness, perhaps because there’s none to be had. Instead, you applaud the breakthroughs, the stirring-up of feelings and flaws that nobody talks about but everyone knows.