In Chappelle’s Show, Charlie Murphy described Rick James as a habitual line stepper. If James is a habitual line stepper Borat Director Larry Charles is a line eradicator. Constantly rising beneath vulgarity as the brilliant Mel Brooks put it, Charles constantly pushes the boundaries of poor taste for the sake of a good chuckle. His latest iteration is the wonderfully named Dicks: The Musical, forgoing any subtlety for rock hard direct mania.
Dicks is your classic Parent Trap Scenario. Craig (Josh Sharp) and Trevor (Aaron Jackson) are kick ass vacuum parts salesman: ONLY the parts, not the vacuum, obviously. Working for the demanding Gloria (Megan Thee Stallion), the hardcore definitely not gay heterosexual men find out they’re long lost siblings, raised by single parents. Craving that family they never had, Craig and Trevor switch places to try to get their mom Evelyn (Megan Mulally) and their dad Harris (Nathan Lane) to get back together, as Lindsey Lohan and Hayley Mills did all those years ago, equally heterosexually, as God (Bowen Yang) narrates.
For the first 30ish minutes, Dicks: The Musical is wonderfully insane. Jackson and Sharp’s world is exaggerated lunacy, with the opening number joyously setting up the movie’s stupid fun premise. From there, Charles’s comedy goes in all sorts of loopy directions as we meet the rest of the cast. There’s extreme hoarder Megan Mulally doing a lispier Ellen Greene from Little Shop of Horrors, but completely deranged and as dirty as Greene was innocent. And then the movie’s highlight for me, our intro to Nathan Lane’s Harris. Lane, the consummate pro, is completely committed to the bit, as Craig and Trevor’s father…who adopts these puppetted, um, creatures called sewer boys, Backpack and Whisper. I couldn’t stop laughing at Nathan Lane going about a normal day, bird regurgitating ham to feed the two puppets while the boys look on in abject horror at these sinister little devils. By not making a big deal out of this poppycock, Larry Charles and Nathan Lane make the whole sequence that much funnier, delivering constant guffaws every minute spent in Harris’s apartment.
The movie loses steam and song power in the middle as Dicks was always probably better as a play or a short. The saving grace are the perennially committed Lane and Mulally, giving their all to something so silly and stupid. But as a tack on, Larry Charles lets the story go on 15 minutes after the arc really ends. What unfolds during that time is…complicated. I can say it was mostly funny, but it certainly was as daring a comedy attempt I’ve seen made in a long time, and by far the meanest. All taboos of all kinds are put onscreen. No one is safe from ridicule, so much so that there’s going to be walkouts from this and potential banning from various more conservative sections of the population. I remember walking out of Dicks, mouth wide open, metaphorically receiving a BJ in movie form after that 15 minute ego stroking deplorable menagerie of mayhem.
Two opposite things are true about Dicks: The Musical. It’s the most unrecommendable, self-indulgent stupid nonsense I’ve seen in a long time. And #2, of course, I liked it. A lot. I can’t wait for the midnight movie destiny to arrive, to show this to random friends ready to see something they’ve never seen before. I also hope this spawns the spinoff: Mr. Harris and the Sewer Boys: From my Backpack to Your Whisper.