The sharp local well-posedness for the one dimensional fourth-order nonlinear Schrödinger equation is established in the Sobolev space Hs(R) for s≥12, which improves the results in Huo and Jia (2007). In addition, we prove that this equation cannot be solved by an iteration scheme based on the Duhamel formula in Hs(R) for s<12. Our method relies upon the Bourgain space and a crucial bilinear estimate, which avoids the tedious classification of the location to the highest dispersion modulation.