Ever since she burst onto the scene more than a decade ago, audiences have struggled to separate Lena Dunham the writer-director-actress from the female leads she creates. First, there was Aura, the floundering film-school student at the center of her semi-autobiographical indie Tiny Furniture, which lit up the festival circuit in 2010 and co-starred real-life family members including her mom, the artist Laurie Simmons, and sibling, Cyrus Grace Dunham. Then, of course, there was Girls’ Hannah Horvath, the Brooklyn-dwelling Oberlin grad (ditto you-know-who) and aspiring writer whose Gen Y ennui and cringeworthy exploits made Dunham both a star and a lightning rod.
In her new film, the sexual-awakening comedy Sharp Stick, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 22, we meet protagonist Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), a cloistered twentysomething who had a medically…
