Stuck in Love (2013)
Directed by Josh Boone
No — Stuck in Love is not woke, scoring 5 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Stuck in Love arrives from 2013 with the quiet confidence of a film that has no interest in arguing with anyone.
Consciousness Markers
Sam is a sexually autonomous young woman and published novelist, but the film treats this as character texture rather than advancing any feminist thesis.
Bill delivers a speech about the writing process at Sam's book launch, but it is craft advice, not social or political lecturing.
The ensemble is almost entirely white (Kinnear, Connelly, Collins, Wolff, Lerman, Bell), with no evident effort at inclusive or color-conscious casting.
No LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes appear anywhere in the narrative.
Race is entirely absent as a subject; the story is a white suburban family drama with no racial consciousness whatsoever.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No critique of wealth, capitalism, or class structures; the characters are comfortable middle-class writers.
No body-positivity themes or messaging.
No neurodivergent characters or themes.
No historical revisionism; the film is a contemporary fictional family drama.
Why it received this score
Stuck in Love arrives from 2013 with the quiet confidence of a film that has no interest in arguing with anyone. Josh Boone's debut follows a novelist, his ex-wife, and their two children through a year of Thanksgivings in coastal North Carolina. Every person in it is white, comfortable, and gainfully employed in the literary arts. Race never surfaces as a subject. Neither does class, climate, or any of the other items on the contemporary checklist. The characters simply have feelings, and the film observes them with the patience of a well-made television pilot. It opened in limited release and never pretended to be more than it is.
The daughter, Sam, writes a novel and takes lovers without apology. This registers as texture, not thesis. The film grants her autonomy and then moves on, uninterested in making a case for anything. Her brother's courtship of a classmate unfolds with its own small tragedies. When Bill stands at his daughter's book launch to speak about the writing life, he offers craft advice: read widely, revise ruthlessly, tell the truth. It is a sermon about semicolons, not society. A late subplot involving an assault is handled so briskly that it nearly passes for plot mechanics.
What remains is a modest, uneven romance that scored 57 percent with critics and has aged into a curious artifact. The Stephen King cameo is a nice touch. The soundtrack is better than the screenplay. Nothing here agitates, and nothing here offends. It is a film about people who write, made for people who read, and it asks nothing more of its audience than two hours of mild attention.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
An acclaimed writer, his ex-wife, and their teenaged children come to terms with the complexities of love in all its forms over the course of one tumultuous year.
Questions about Stuck in Love
Is Stuck in Love woke?
No — Stuck in Love is not woke, scoring 5 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Stuck in Love have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Feminist Agenda at 8.
How does Stuck in Love compare to other 2013 movies?
It ranks #197 of the 274 films from 2013 we've scored; their average is 14. The wokest is Belle (76).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.