Just Looking

Just Looking is a 1999 American comedy-drama set in 1955. Lenny is a fourteen-year-old boy consumed by an interest in sex, though he is far too frightened to try anything himself. He decides to spend his summer trying to watch other people instead, but he is caught spying and his mother and stepfather send him away to stay with his aunt and uncle in Queens, which his family treats as the countryside. With his plan apparently ruined, the summer looks set to be dull until he falls in with a new group of teenagers who run what they call a sex club. The film was directed by Jason Alexander and written by Marshall Karp, and produced by Jean Doumanian.

Ryan Merriman plays Lenny, with Gretchen Mol as Hedy Coletti, Patti LuPone as Sylvia Levine Polinsky, Peter Onorati as Phil DiLorenzo, Richard V. Licata as Mort Polinsky and Joey Franquinha as John. The film runs 97 minutes.

Made for a modest budget of 3 million dollars, the film holds a 6.6 rating on IMDb from around 1,700 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 5.9 from a much smaller base of 27 votes. The wider IMDb sample points to a generally favorable if not enthusiastic response, and it remains a small-scale coming-of-age story that marked Alexander's move into feature directing after his earlier work on the 1996 film For Better or Worse.