Add playing an aging rock star and being able to deliver a
mean guitar lick to Meryl Steep’s impressive resume as she’s required to do
both in her latest, Ricki and the Flash, a fun movie as far as it goes, which
unfortunately isn’t far enough. Sporting a script by Diablo Cody (Juno), the
film takes a standard fish-out-of-water premise – dropping an aging rock and
roller back into the upper middle class world she fled years earlier – and does
very little with it, using a standard familial crisis as its foundation but
failing to develop it in any meaningful way.
Ricki (Streep), formerly Linda Brummel, having left her
family in Indianapolis, has been pursuing her dream of being a rock and roll
star for years. It’s hardly turned out the way she planned as the pinnacle for
her and her group the Flash has been to become the house band for a bar in
Tarzana, California. These musicians are
birds of a feather – all well past their prime, enthusiastically pounding out
covers of other’s hits, looking ridiculous as crow’s feet and liver spots tend
to clash with leather jackets and turquoise jewelry. Broke and lonely, Ricki is
stunned when she gets a phone call from her ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline)
asking her to return to the heartland as their daughter Julie (Streep’s
daughter Mamie Gummer) is in a tailspin due to her husband having left her.
The problems that ensue upon her return are standard issue,
taken from the familial conflict file. Harboring
years of resentment towards their mother, Julie and her brothers Josh and Dan (Sebastian
Stan & Ben Platt) take their turns letting her have it with torrents of
vitriol, while the inevitable run-in with their stepmother (Audra McDonald)
proves as awkward as one might imagine. Having to contend with Ricki’s homophobia
upon learning one of her sons is gay comes off as a lazy attempt to generate
conflict while a climactic wedding scene is half-baked and provides a far too
easy resolution for all the family turmoil that’s gone on before.
It come as no surprise that the cast makes all of this
bearable and at times enjoyable. Streep
is obviously having a good time, letting her hair down in a role that doesn’t
require the usual amount of heavy lifting.Â
Gummer accords herself well as does Rick Springfield, amiable and
sincere as Ricki’s boyfriend. Kline
proves an absolute delight, trying to maintain a sense of decorum as chaos
reigns around him, employing slow burns to great effect. To be sure, the music scenes are fun but they
run too long, I suspect as a distraction from the thin story, which is nothing
but an old tune.
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2015.
