This musical has big laughs and high spirits.
“Dicks: The Musical” is A24’s first musical, and I think it likes to satirize itself by having a variety of weird elements to its story. Some of them are ghastly, some of them are just over the top, a lot of them are campy, and a lot of them are very funny. I’ve had some strange reactions to the film, regarding jokes about mutant babies or incest, and I still do. And yet, I was laughing at the satire.
Gay screenwriters and actors Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson transcend their off-Broadway play “F***ing Identical Twins” in a feature film with Larry Charles (“Borat”) directing. They both have the eccentricity to keep us going, treating the movie like “Tim & Eric” meets “The Parent Trap.”
Set on a stage version of New York (at least I think it’s supposed to be New York), they play two straight dicks, Craig (Sharp) and Trevor (Jackson), who both start off as business adversaries and find out they are twin brothers separated at birth. And they think that getting their parents back together will make them one big happy family.
Craig has lived with his mom Evelyn (Megan Mullally), whose knick knacks and eccentric attire conceals the fact that her vagina has literally fallen off, while Trevor has lived with his dad Harris (Nathan Lane), who comes out of the closet and takes care of his Sewer Boys.
So, the twins decide….Wait! I’m sorry. What do I mean by “Sewer Boys?” What are Sewer Boys? They’re inbred creatures (with freaky voices by Tom Kenny and Frank Todaro) Harris has discovered in the sewer, brought them to his apartment, put ankle monitors on them, and keeps them in a cage. He hasn’t been socializing in years ever since he brought them home.
Okay, anyway…. the twins decide to trade places with each other to trick their parents into having dinner together. Trevor would play Craig, and Craig would play Trevor, and they’re both freaked out by their parents’ behaviors and issues. And believe me, they have a lot of them. The kind that no human being would ever want to be around with.
On the side, you get Megan Thee Stallion enjoying herself as the twin’s female boss Gloria. Yes, their boss is female, because times are changing. She delivers the right notions in a small satire on how women should get rid of all the men, which won’t work, because they need to reproduce somehow. And she does a much better job than how Regina Hall played the bratty boss in “Little.”
And on another side, you have the narrator as God, who is in the form of a gay, flamboyant man, played by Bowen Yang. He’s got enough X-factor and positivity to move things along. And in this movie, he comes in many forms, some more lively than others.
Even if the story about how the twins have to get their parents back together and eventually become romantically involved is a bit much, “Dicks: The Musical” is delightful and strange, and I liked that notion. Sharp, Jackson, and Lane are all very funny with various comical aspects. There’s a lot of exuberance with an “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” attitude that makes it a fun movie. A24 is known for releasing movies that divide critics and audiences, so see what you think.
Now Playing in Select Theaters and Expands This Friday
This article was written by me with full support of the SAG-AFTRA strike.
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