Don Jon

This film was a disappointment.
Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a New Jersey native, with the accent to match. He's obsessed with his apartment, his religion (he goes to confession every week for goodness sake) and his porn. Yes, that's right. He loves all of those things. Porn turns him on even more so than women. He likes women and sleeps with them frequently but nothing satisfies him like porn.
Jon and his friends, Bobby (Rob Brown) and Danny (Jeremy Luke) go out to bars often where they rate women. Here, Jon notices a dime (Scarlet Johansson). He makes out with her but she won't go home with him. He wants her so he asks around. Her name happens to be Barbara Sugarman. For the first time, Jon even dates her, meets her friends before having sex with her. It's great, almost as good as porn. There is only one catch with Barbara, she warns him from the beginning, don't lie to her. So, after Jon jokes off her catching him with porn, he must keep it secret and thus rarely watches it at home.
Barbara wants Jon to be better. She thinks he's different from normal guys. She encourages him to take a class at a community college. Which he does. Even his family (Tony Danza as his still horny father, Glenne Headly as his mother and Brie Larson as his forever texting sister) love her. Dad likes how she looks, Mom likes how nice she is while Sister Monica says nothing, just keeps texting away, something which she even does in church.
Things finally burst. Jon didn't clear his history on his lab top. Barbara finds out that he still watches porn and she's furious and breaks up with him. Jon takes the news badly, with road rage getting the best of him, going as far as punching the window out in another car.
Luckily, he has back-up. An odd woman in his college class, Esther (Julianne Moore). She is liberal and doesn't care much that he watches porn. She wants to know why and wants him to acknowledge the fact that he does have an addiction. Jon believes that he can stop at any time, though he really can't. Quitting cold turkey is hard (no pun intended), but he does try. He finally learns that sex doesn't have to be all one-sided and that he can lose himself in another person. That person just happens to be Esther. Esther is damaged, losing her husband and son in a nasty car accident. She smokes pot to cope.
Jon also learns that Barbara has her own unrealist expectations of her life, losing herself in cheesy romantic comedies that can never happen. That what she believes will happen. I don't really care that Barbara's out of the picture.
Jon's parents don't take the break-up well, but Monica is actually okay with it and tells him so, finally getting her face out of her phone. Jon continues his relationship with Esther, happy without so much porn in his life.
Gordon-Levitt is a great director, getting great performances out of everyone, including himself. The editing is quick and fast paced and some cool cameos from Hollywood's biggest stars are great but the problems lay in the characters. Jon is unlikeable but he's supposed to be. He lifts weights while saying his penance and cusses out other drivers on a regular basis. Barbara wears some extremely tight clothes but still likes holding men at an arm's length which just strikes me as odd. She needs to stop wearing stuff that sexy. Esther is rather underdeveloped for having such as important role. And this may be wrong, because men often end up with a woman twenty years younger than themselves, but I just can't stand Moore and Gordon-Levitt together. It's part of what's wrong with Hollywood and how the public generally perceives the world. At least Jon's character got to where he needed to be by the end of the film, but next, pick a better script, JGL. Grade: B+