Dicks: The Musical. The name is stupid, intentionally so. You already know going in that this is going to be a proudly dumb movie, and it definitely is. The two lead characters, Trevor Brock and Craig Tittle, played by writers Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp in an expansion of their musical Fucking Identical Twins, proudly sing to the rooftops about the size of their massive genitalia and sexual prowess with women. They want you to know they are VERY heterosexual and not at all overcompensating for anything. That Jackson and Sharp are gay men playing “straight” is about as clever as this loud, uncomfortably unfunny film gets as it makes the case for the worst comedy of the year.
Trevor and Craig are identical twins, and despite God’s (a very flamboyant Bowen Yang) insistance, they look absolutely nothing alike. However, they quickly come to realize just how alike they are in personality. Both work as salesman at the same vacuum parts company, run by a bossy Megan Thee Stallion, and are hyper-competitive at work and with the ladies. When they learn that they really are long-lost siblings, they put their beef aside in order to get their parents back together and have the family they were denied as kids.
So yeah, Dicks: The Musical is basically a perverted Parent Trap. Getting the parentals reunited is going to be a problem, though. Megan Mullally plays their mother, Evelyn, a weirdo in a wheelchair, a broken back, the voice of annoying child, who thinks she’s more than 90-years-old, and…oh yeah, her vagina literally got up and ran away. She has no vagina. Well, she does have one. It’s just kept in a bag. >sigh<
Nathan Lane is their father, Harris, a dapper chap who, at this late stage, is only now realizing that he’s gay. That he’s been fucking men for years wasn’t enough of a clue, apparently. Oh, and he keeps and cares for a pair of heinous monsters, his Sewer Boys, that he found and adopted while sailing in the sewers of New York City.
None of this is particularly funny. Some of it is extremely odd, sure, and brash as Hell. Mullally and Lane are clearly having a blast being as vulgar and weird as possible. But Jackson and Sharp are especially horrible, and instantly overshadowed in the presence of the veteran actors. If this wasn’t a musical backed by A24, the boutique distributor that usually has its finger on the pulse of what’s hot or will be hot, then nobody would give this movie a second look. But the pulse is weak here, so weak somebody should’ve pulled the plug prematurely. Sharp and Jackson’s musical numbers, which seem designed in the hope they’ll be performed at the Oscars, don’t feature anything nifty in terms of choreography and the lyrics pile on as many uses of the word “dick” as possible, but little else.
At only 86-minutes in length, Dicks: The Musical should have enough momentum to go the distance. But instead, it’s a one-note joke that wears out its welcome early and dies flat whenever Mullally and Lane are elsewhere. They have the best moments by far, and appear to be improvising a lot of the best jokes, catching one another off-guard. Not even Megan Thee Stallion, with her crass alpha female rap about destroying all men and walking them like dogs, is enough to pull this movie out of the dumps.
The thing is, Dicks: The Musical has elements that could’ve worked if a bit more thought had gone into it. By the end of the movie, Jackson and Sharp have thrown out what little civility they were holding onto, embracing the wildest and most offensive plot twists possible while God normalizes them in real time. It’s goofy and ridiculous, but a lot more effective than simply shouting at us the way Jackson and Sharp had been doing, in an attempt to convince us how transgressive their movie is. Sure, maybe it is. And maybe Dicks: The Musical is a crude and rude home run swing from the first-time filmmakers, but it’ll be remembered for that swing missing by a country mile. You know it’s a problem when the outtakes get the biggest laughs at the screening you’re at. In them, Lane frequently jokes about this as the most humiliating point of his career, and while he’s saying it as a joke, he also isn’t far from the truth.
Dicks: The Musical opens in theaters on October 6th.