There's an extremely telling scene about halfway into Don Jon where the titular character, played by writer and director Joseph Gordon-Levitt, takes his dream girl, Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), on a date to see a romantic comedy. Romantic movies are her favorite, but he dismisses them as completely unrealistic. "Everyone knows it's fake, but they watch it like it's real life," he says. Coming from a guy who's obsessed with porn, this judgment on starry-eyed romance flicks seems a bit hypocritical, which of course is the point.

What they should've seen at the multiplex – if some sort of Being John Malkovich wormhole could have allowed it – is Don Jon.

On the surface, the movie may appear to be about one young Lothario's love affair with pornography, but it's really about how media shapes the way we think about both sex and love. Don Jon depicts porn and romantic comedies as opposite but similar poles, both fantasies that create unrealistic expectations for Jon and Barbara about what a romantic partner should do for them. Jon and Barbara's romcom date serves as a nexus for this conflict; Jon goes to the movie in hopes of getting laid, while Barbara goes in hopes that her date will act like the leading man on screen. Their choices in entertainment may be different, but their goals are the same: perpetuating the illusions about sex and dating that they see in the media, which are impossible to live up to because they're just that – illusions.

In an interview with WIRED, Gordon-Levitt explained that he made the film, in part, to combat the way media influences us to sometimes treat each other more like things than people.

"I've worked as an actor since I was a kid and I've noticed – certainly in the last few years especially – people will say to me, 'Why can't my life be like that movie you were in?' or 'Why can't I find somebody like you in that movie?'" said Gordon-Levitt. "And frankly I find that a little startling. Look, I love movies, but movies are different than real life."

(Spoiler alert: Minor spoilers for Don Jon follow.)

While the sex we see in movies – both pornographic and otherwise – may be fantasies, for many viewers, like the porn addict Jon and his romcom-loving love interest, the fictional can start to define both the real and the ideal. Throughout much of Don Jon, Gordon-Levitt swears porn is better than the real thing, but that's only because porn has defined his ideas about sex.

Make Love Not Porn founder Cindy Gallop discussed a similar idea in her very popular 2009 TED Talk about how pornography – while not inherently a bad thing – has become de facto sex education. On her (NSFW) Make Love Not Porn website, Gallop describes many of the familiar tropes of pornography, and contrasts them with reality: how the experiences and desires of real people are often very different from the way they are portrayed by porn stars.

"[As] with the majority of young men (and many women) today, Jon's sexual development has been driven by porn rather than human sexual interaction, with unfortunate results, including a preference for porn over actual live sex," Gallop told WIRED in an email about the film. "The movie demonstrates very clearly the fundamental difference between the two, in a way that I suspect will prove revelatory to many dedicated porn fans in the audience."

Those revelations, Gallop noted, could lead to more open and honest conversations about sex, which Gordon-Levitt told WIRED was one of his goals with Don Jon. "I wanted a movie that would provoke those sorts of conversations. I hear people having conversations [around the film] about the way that our culture defines men and women and love and sex and the way that the media contributes to that."

And to be clear, Don Jon isn't anti-porn. It simply seeks to place pornography more firmly in the "fantasy" box, and remind viewers that just because a man or woman in a porn film seemed to really enjoy something in a porno doesn't mean your boyfriend or girlfriend will (or that you will either).

What's interesting about Don Jon is how Gordon-Levitt manages to lay this out so clearly using the visual language of the media he's critiquing. At times, the depiction of Jon's life resembles a romantic comedy with its sweeping dolly shots, soft lighting, and energetic cuts. However, when Jon loses his dream girl – and discovers that the problem wasn't her, but his own expectations – the movie's visual mood changes dramatically. Jon meets an older woman named Esther (Julianne Moore), whose no-BS approach teaches him what love and sex can be like between two humans who aren't acting out a cultural script, and all of the sudden the images on screen – gritty, nuanced and sexy – start looking a lot more like reality.