'Dicks: The Musical' has the audacity, but not the delivery

A24's first-ever musical offers go-for-broke work from Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally, but not enough of its gags are successful

Dicks: The Musical is one of those movies that’s so ridiculous, subversive, over-the-top, and outrageous that it’s hard to believe it actually exists. I just wish it had been better, and that its comedy had more hits than misses. 

Based on a two-man stage show called F*cking Identical Twins that got its start at the UCB Theater in New York, Dicks: The Musical is a riff on The Parent Trap, only with the long-lost identical twins both adult men. The other difference is that it seems like every single character has had a traumatic brain injury. 

Plus, it’s a full-on musical, with about a dozen original songs, and all of the raunch you could possibly imagine. It also very clearly fakes its New York locations, complete with stock footage that looks like it’s left over from the Mad Men era. 

The film is adapted by and stars the show’s creators, the duo of Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp, and it’s directed by the comedy heavyweight Larry Charles, a Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm veteran who also directed the first Borat movie and created the underrated Netflix show Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy. 

Jackson and Sharp star as a pair of hotshot salesman types — gay men, parodying alpha male heterosexuality —  who both get hired at the same company and realize, a la The Parent Trap, that they’re long-lost identical twins. That they look nothing alike, often forget their own names, and appear unfamiliar with basic human function is all part of the extended absurdity. 

So they decide to make like Haley Mills (and later Lindsay Lohan), switch places, and try to get their long-divorced parents (Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally) to reunite. The problem is, he’s gay, and she’s an extreme eccentric, not to mention that her female genitalia has “fallen off.” 

It is, needless to say, an absurd premise, one that the script just doesn’t have the horses to justify. I’d say about a quarter of the gags work, and the rest don’t. It’s just not really grounded in anything real. Another A24 film this year, Beau is Afraid, took some extreme flights of fancy as well, but they were at least grounded in the main mother/son story. 

Mother Schmuckers, the 2021 Belgian film from Harpo and Lenny Guit, was a much better version of a similar idea, also featuring a pair of brothers acting like psychopaths and crossing all sorts of ethical and moral lines for a little bit over an hour.

Lane and Mullally really, truly give their all, with Mullally stealing virtually all of her scenes while doing an off-kilter, lisping Southern accent that never gets old. But it’s a problem that neither Jackson nor Sharp is nearly enough of a screen presence to hold their own opposite the likes of Lane and Mullally. 

Lane’s character also lives with a pair of grotesque mutant “sewer boys,” portrayed by puppets, and I can’t possibly stress enough that nothing involving the puppets is ever funny for a single moment. 

Megan Thee Stallion plays the brothers’ boss, who gets a very strong musical number that’s very much in her style, while SNL’s Bowen Yang is the narrator, a gay version of God. 

That, as well as the ending, seems like the sort of thing meant to start a culture war with Fox News, except Fox News doesn’t tend to pay a lot of attention to indie movies released by A24. 

As for the musical numbers, they’re often very funny, but I felt like there was a missed opportunity to have more fun subverting the Broadway and movie musical canons, the way it’s been in the past by the South Park movie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and later Apple’s Schmigadoon. 

Dicks: The Musical is an idea that belongs in a black box off-off-Broadway theater in New York in which everyone in the audience is a few drinks in, and if I’d seen it that way I probably would have liked it more. Had I seen it at the Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness, which it played last month, I might have reacted better too.

The film is certainly John Waters-esque, although I’m reminded that I once heard Waters say that he almost always hates movies that are described as “John Waters-esque.”