Larry Charles’s musical comedy is so hellbent on being outrageous that it just ends up being tiresome.
The funniest part of “Dicks: The Musical” sneaks in at the very end, when outtakes are interspersed with the credits. Nathan Lane, in particular, comes across as a living illustration of the words “game” and “trooper.” He and his co-star Megan Mullally, pros that they are, elegantly suggest hints of disbelief at just how they ended up in a movie in which his character spits pre-chewed cold cuts into the gaping maws of hideous puppet monsters and hers complains that her vagina has flown away (at one point it attaches itself to someone like the facehugger in “Alien”).
On paper this sounds intriguing, in a Troma Entertainment kind of way, and maybe one day this musical comedy will turn into a cult film like that company’s “Surf Nazis Must Die” or some of the jetsam perpetually washing up at pop culture’s edges.
For now this movie from the hip indie studio A24 simply exerts itself as it tries way too hard to join the hallowed ranks of exploitation favorites extolling schlock values.
Directed by Larry Charles (“Borat”), the film was adapted by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp from a show they performed at Upright Citizens Brigade in the mid-2010s. The two writers also play the supposedly identical twins Trevor and Craig, who were raised separately after their parents (Lane and Mullally) split up. The siblings, whose straightness is too aggressive to not be conspicuous, coincidentally work at the same company, where they compete for the title of best salesman and the attention of their boss, Gloria (Megan Thee Stallion, who gets the movie’s single best number, “Out-Alpha the Alpha”).
The new colleagues’ relationship is frosty at first: “You have long hair like a girl,” Craig tells Trevor; “you have short hair like a lesbian girl,” Trevor replies, expertly wielding the rapier wit of a peeved eight-year-old. But eventually, the pair team up to reunite their folks. One potential obstacle is that their father, Harris, is decidedly not heterosexual. Cue the song “Gay Old Life,” in which Harris details his fabulous queer existence and introduces the aforementioned creatures, his beloved Sewer Boys. (Jackson and Sharp wrote the passable songs with Karl Saint Lucy and Marius de Vries, and their staging is mostly anemic.)
Once Lane and Mullally, who plays the lisping mom Evelyn like a 1930s movie’s idea of a Park Avenue eccentric, enter the story, they hijack it from Jackson and Sharp, which is not necessarily a bad thing but also destabilizes the movie.
Despite brief instances when it spills into surreal madness, most notably in a scene set in a sewer, the film is rudderless — which is a polite way to say limp. Its only point is highly self-aware pseudo-gonzo provocation, peaking in a denouement that feels both surprising and inevitable, and looks as if it had been engineered to deliberately unsettle some viewers. Some keyboard warriors and craven politicians might take the bait, while the rest of us will be left wondering why Lane and Mullally didn’t get a song with Megan Thee Stallion.
Dicks: The Musical
Rated R for language, sexual single entendres, cartoonish taboo-breaking and offenses against musical theater. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
