THE KNACK... AND HOW TO GET IT

Colin is a nervous schoolteacher working in London, observing rather than participating in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. He has little personal sexual experience and wishes to gain "the knack" of how to seduce women. He turns to his friend and tenant, a confident womaniser known only by his surname, Tolen. Tolen gives him unhelpful advice to consume more protein and use intuition, acknowledging that intuition is not something that can be completely learned. He advocates the importance of dominating women and suggests that Colin should let another friend move into Colin's spare room, and they could "share" women.

Colin boards the front door shut. Tom, who is passing, takes up occupation of the vacant room. He is obsessed with painting everything white, including the windowpanes. Due to the blocked door, Tolen now brings his women in through the window. Colin swaps his single bed for a fancy old wrought-iron double bed that he finds in a scrapyard with Tom. Nancy meets Colin at the scrapyard. Nancy is an inexperienced and shy young woman who has arrived in London from out of town and is searching for the YWCA. She stops by a clothing store and is won over by the flattery of the clerk until she overhears him repeating the same words to every female customer.

From the scrapyard, the three take the bed on a complex and zany journey back to the house. This includes parking it at a parking meter, moving it on a car transporter, floating it along the River Thames, and carrying it down the steps of the Royal Albert Hall.

In a public space, Tolen sexually assaults Nancy, who at first is silent and then faints. When she wakes up, she claims she was raped, though this was not the case. Tolen, Colin, and Tom are unable to restrain her from loudly repeating the allegations or puncturing the tyres of Tolen's motorcycle. She runs back to the house, where she throws Tolen's records out of the window and strips naked. The men become convinced her rape allegations reflect a rape fantasy and urge Tolen to have sex with her. When Nancy emerges from the room wearing only a robe, she instead expresses more attraction to Colin, and he returns her interest. The two begin living together.

Nancy ultimately expresses her attraction to Colin rather than Tolen, and the two begin living together.

The film’s resolution sees the innocent Nancy rejecting the aggressive advances of Tolen in favor of Colin’s genuine awkwardness, flipping the expected roles of seducer and seduced. Rather than reward bravado, the story sides with vulnerability and mutual affection, satirizing the era’s obsession with sexual prowess while offering a quietly subversive take on romance.