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DICKS: THE MUSICAL
86 minutes, rated MA
Selected cinemas
Reviewed by JAKE WILSON
★★★
Happy families are rare in US indie cinema, but the one in Dicks: The Musical has to be even more dysfunctional than most. Adult sons Craig (Josh Sharp) and Trevor (Aaron Jackson) are twins working as salesmen for the same company and are stuck in a cycle of macho one-upmanship that distracts them from seeing the truth about their empty lives.
No less miserable and isolated are their long-divorced parents. Their mother Evelyn (Megan Mullally) is a mentally ill recluse – and while their father Harrison (Nathan Lane) has found the courage to come out of the closet, his alcoholism and creepy obsessions appear to limit his opportunities to find a partner.
Nobody is having much fun, so you might suppose the audience wouldn’t be either. But the entertaining if not uproarious Dicks: The Musical is a very broad comedy indeed – and yes, it’s genuinely a musical, first staged off-Broadway under the title F–king Identical Twins by Sharp and Jackson, who are responsible for the dialogue and the relentlessly profane lyrics (Karl Saint Lucy wrote the music).
Twins Craig (Josh Sharp) and Trevor (Aaron Jackson) with Bowen Yang as a blinged-up God.Credit:
The movie version is directed by Larry Charles (Borat) who evidently hasn’t done much to alter the highly theatrical material, beyond changing the title and adding some familiar faces to what was originally a two-hander: aside from Mullally and Lane, the line-up includes Bowen Yang, who narrates from Heaven as a blinged-up God.
The approach is studiously outrageous, somewhere between the low camp of 1970s John Waters and the schoolboy naughtiness of South Park, with a twist of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The core joke remains the casting of the leads, which challenges our suspension of disbelief on more than one level: Sharp and Jackson are playing identical twins who don’t look anything alike, and who proclaim their aggressive straightness while channelling the giddy excitement of tween girls at a slumber party.
On top of this, we’re asked to accept an unlikely though ancient plot device: Evelyn and Craig split soon after the birth of their children, who were consequently raised in separate households, neither knowing of the other’s existence. Since Craig and Trevor aren’t the brightest bulbs, it takes them a while to figure this out – but once they do, their rivalry turns to heartfelt friendship as they launch a plan to reunite their parents by switching places in the manner of The Parent Trap.
It’s a fragile but workable framework for what is basically a series of sketches: Mulhally and Lane serve as parental figures on more than one level, stepping in whenever the one-note performances of the leads begin to pall. The best number belongs to guest star Megan Thee Stallion as the heroes’ domineering boss, who stalks around the office set in a 1980s power suit proclaiming her alpha status – but, as the script winkingly acknowledges, neither she nor her song have much to do with the story.
Other opportunities are missed, or deliberately set aside. Personality-wise, Craig and Trevor really are identical, so there’s not much comic potential in one being mistaken for the other. That said, it’s probably for the best that Charles and his team don’t get too bogged down worrying about the significance of what they’re doing, which would undoubtedly give a therapist plenty to work with.
Certainly, nobody involved with the production wants to think too hard about the implications of the Sewer Boys, a pair of repulsive puppet gremlins kept by Harrison as pets – however plainly they serve as further doubles for the heroes, in their own grubby way.
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