` `
Home
Send Email
Saturday, November 16th

Upstairs at 8:30 PM

Dicks: The Musical
 
Dicks - Trailer
Dicks: The Musical
(2023, 86 min)

Country: USA

Director: Larry Charles

Studio: A24

Language: English

SYNOPSIS:

God narrates the tale of Craig and Trevor, two straight, womanizing, misogynistic business salesmen who are, unbeknownst to them, identical twins separated at birth by their parents. When their companies undergo a merger, they finally meet. Initially competitive with one another, they realize that they are brothers when they notice each other's matching necklace pendants and learn each other's birthdays.

Dissatisfied with their experiences growing up, they hatch a plan to get their parents back together to become a "real family". They each disguise themselves as one another and visit their other parent: Craig visits Evelyn, their shut-in and eccentric mother whose vagina had fallen off and died, and Trevor visits Harrison, their newly out gay father, who keeps two humanoid genetic mutants called "sewer boys" in a cage in his home.

Some time later, the family all move in together into an apartment, where Craig and Trevor share a room and bed and discover their intense sexual attraction to each other. They later get married in a ceremony officiated by God, which is interrupted by protestors and religious conservatives, decrying the union of two gay identical twins. God sternly lectures the protestors for their hatefulness and declares that Craig and Trevor's union will be added into the newest edition of his bestseller, The Bible. They all celebrate the union and the revelation that God is gay.

From its eyebrow-raising title to its gleefully provocative humor, talented cast, and catchy songs, Dicks: The Musical is a cult movie in the making


REVIEW:

‘Dicks: The Musical’ Wants to Be the Most Offensive Musical Ever. It Nearly Succeeds. Opening the Toronto International Film Festival’s ‘Midnight Madness’ section, this musical about identical twins goes for shock, screams and hilarity — and settles for two outta three

Based on Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson’s underground two-person stage show — literally underground, as they performed it in the basement of a New York City grocery store — Dicks: The Musical does its absolute best to live up to its name. (Their project played for downtown audiences as Fucking Twins: The Musical, and the new “tamer” title somehow makes it feel more gloriously obscene.) A genuinely screwy take on The Parent Trap, the story of two alpha-male salesmen who discover they’re long-lost identical twins who were separated as kids, and then strive to reunite their now-geriatric divorced parents, goes to great lengths to be viewed as the most offensive movie-musical of all time. Until someone brings The Book of Mormon to a multiplex near you, it comes close enough to temporarily earning those bragging rights. Whether the duo and Curb Your Enthusiasm/Borat director Larry Charles’ screen version works on any other level is debatable, and you can feel it straining to hit the levels of delirium that’d make it the cult-classic cock of the town it so desperately hopes to be. But it won’t stop until it puts the hard back into “hard-R raunch-com” or die trying.

Neither Craig (Sharp) nor Trevor (Jackson) look even remotely alike. They’re both tall, lanky, and have impressively long schlongs. And they do share a love of singing about their loverman bona fides at length, courtesy of an opening number set on a comically fake Broadway street plastered with posters for fake Broadway shows like My Queer Lady and Jeffrey, What Have You Done? (As in Jeffrey Dahmer.) But no one’s going to mistake these guys for each other, until late one evening at the office, as they compete for the most sales of Vroomba parts, Craig and Trevor discover they each possess one half of a broken-heart locket. Holy shit, they’re actually identical twins! What are the odds? Where have they been all these years?

Trevor was raised by his mom Evelyn (Megan Mullally), an elderly eccentric with a lispy mid-Atlantic accent and a missing vagina. Sorry, strike that: She knows where it is, because she keeps it in her purse, it’s just that it fell off one day and nearly “crawled away like a cockroach” after sprouting eyes. You know how it goes. Craig was raised by dad Harris (Nathan Lane), a recluse who’s recently come out of the closet. He spends his days guzzling wine and feeding pre-chewed deli meat to his “Sewer Boys,” two miniature creatures in diapers he discovered during an explorer’s expedition up the, er, sewer, and has kept in a cage for years. After donning cheap wigs, each son goes to the other’s parent and convinces them to take them out to dinner at the same restaurant. Once Mom and Dad discover they’ve been set up, boom! Rekindled love and nuclear-family bliss.

Sharp and Jackson know you know and likely love these clichés as much as they do, and that nothing sells outrageous, cabaret-style camp more than Broadway-style song-and-dance numbers. These should be the highlights of Dicks: The Musical — see title! — and the fact that they got Mullally and Lane to sign up for this adds a whole other level of razzle-dazzle nuttiness. Ditto enlisting Megan Thee Stallion to play Craig and Trevor’s boss, which allows the “Savage” superstar to turn a boiler-room office into a set where she can rest her stiletto heels on male underlings’ throats. It’s a stand-alone sequence that stands out by default, simply because she’s doing what she does best; you could release this whole segment as a music video and it’d still work. Speaking of Megans: Mullally also reminds you that among her many talents is an extreme commitment to extreme circumstances and even more extreme jokes. Need her to sell a song about having nothing between her legs? She will not only do it in a runaway wheelchair but sustain that last full-throated note for 22 seconds. Just put these two in a movie together, dub it The Book of Megan, and call it a day.

That would be way preferable to simply watching Dicks: The Musical straight, no chaser, and having your tolerance for parody and taboo-tweaking pushed to the breaking point. A colleague compared it to a live-action South Park episode, which seems aspirational; it’s closer to watered-down John Waters, and you couldn’t say their chops as musical composers and lyricists are up to Stone-Parker levels. (Just adding “fucking” to every other line may help you stay in meter, but also reads as lazy and gets real old, real quick.) To its credit, the movie does go there, in terms of there being some places you really hope it won’t go. It’s shameless in how much it will do anything to shock, and for every joke that hits — an opening disclaimer that this movie features “two gay men playing heterosexuals, which is very brave”; every too-brief scene featuring Bowen Yang as God, the role he was born to play — there are a dozen bits that are little more than bug-eyed reaction shots to shrieked punch lines. If Sharp & Jackson can’t make you laugh, they’ll at least make you gasp. There will be dick.

The midnight moviegoers ate it up, and the sheer pandemonium of hearing a crowd roar to, say, a vagina with stalk eyes flying in to save the day is better than nothing. You can’t accuse Dicks: The Musical of phoning in a half-assed take on material that demands you bring the big-dick energy or GTFO. But there’s a big difference between being loud and rude and being hilarious, cutting, or even clever. The movie keeps it up for a good long while. It could just use a few more inches.

--Reviewed By David Fear, RollingStone (https://www.rollingstone.com)