TONE DEAF: a review of "Ricki And The Flash"

"RICKI AND THE FLASH"
Screenplay Written by Diablo Cody
Directed by Jonathan Demme
* (one star)

I swear if Meryl Streep is greeted with accolades during awards season for this, then I will hurl myself down a flight of stairs, have it filmed and uploaded onto the internet for eternal consumption.

Dear readers, I am not a member of "The Cult Of Meryl" and proudly so. This is nothing personal, mind you, as I don't know her in real life at all and furthermore, this is not a denigration of her legendary talents. I am simply rallying against a perception that ANYTHING she does in regards to her performances, no matter what it is or how good it actually happens to be, she will receive delirious acclaim and rapturous awards recognition, nominations and wins that may not even be deserved and only exist to serve and fuel the cult.

Yes, my feelings do all come down to a sense of personal tastes but let's be real, people. There is greatness all over the place in Meryl Streep on-going filmography but do you really believe that her work in "The Devil Wears Prada" (2006), or "Mamma Mia!" (2008) is on the same artistic level as her work in say "Sophie's Choice" (1982), "Silkwood" (1983), "Death Becomes  Her" (1992), "Adaptation" (2002) or "Doubt" (2008), for example? Come on! You can't strike gold every singe time at bat and that goes even for the very best of the best as the likes of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino can easily attest as they have each made some stinkers. For Meryl Streep, the screamingly tone deaf "Ricki And The Flash" is one that she may wish to hide under the cat litter. Believe me, it's awful!

"Ricki And The Flash" stars Meryl Streep as Ricki Rendazzo, guitarist and lead singer for the titular combo, a strong bar band that specializes in classic rock (although they're trying to expand their repertoire with more current material by Lady Gaga and Pink) and features the talents of not only Parliament-Funkadelic keyboard legend Bernie Worrell on the "88s," drummer Joe Vitale, and the late, great bassist Rick Rosas but even the man himself, Rick Springfield as Greg, Ricki's lead guitarist and longtime paramour.

As the band has a teeny-tiny fan base in one Texarkana, California based bar, and her dreams of rock and roll stardom have long evaded her (she has just one studio album to her name), Ricki grudgingly and resentfully attempts to make a living through her day job, a cashier at a trendy, upscale Whole Foods styled grocery store. When one day, Ricki receives a troubling phone call from her wealthy ex-husband Pete (a perpetually bewildered Kevin Kline), who explains that their daughter Julie (played by Streep's real life daughter Mamie Gummer) has undergone a psychological breakdown after the departure of her boyfriend for another woman.

Ricki then trepidaciously makes her way back to her Indiana home town to try and make amends with the family she left behind in pursuit of musical fame and fortune, a family that includes includes her her gay son Daniel (Ben Platt) and her soon to be married son Joshua (Sebastian Shaw).

"Ricki And The Flash" is an unfathomable disaster of tonality and conception, quite shocking to realize that the script was written by Diablo Cody who gave us the wonderful "Juno" (2007) as well as the brutally acerbic "Young Adult" (2011), both of which were directed by Jason Reitman. An even greater shock is that of all filmmakers, the legendary Jonathan Demme, the man behind film classics like "Melvin And Howard" (1980), "Stop Making Sense" "Something Wild" (1986), "The Silence Of The Lambs" (1991), "Philadelphia" (1993), the outstanding "Rachel Getting Married" (2008) as well as a host of concert films, dramas and documentaries was anywhere near the camera, let alone directed it! Demme and Cody were the sole reasons that I ventured out to see this film and surprisingly, they have succeeded in making a film that is so astonishingly out of touch with any sense of reality.

Despite having a structural framework that recalls both "Young Adult" (the embittered failed artist returning to her home town) and "Rachel Getting Married" (a large multi-cultural family in the throes of a wedding ceremony), "Ricki And The Flash" is yet one more of those dysfunctional family movies that arrives, like Director Shawn Levy's "This Is Where I Leave You" (2014), that has absolutely no idea of how families work, operate, live, breathe, implode, destruct and reconstruct all over again. None of the participants in the film feel as if they had even met each other before the cameras rolled as they all have such a tremendous lack of chemistry, most notably Kline and Streep. Every character is presented within the broadest strokes possible and like Director Thomas Bezucha's odious "The Family Stone" (2005), Demme and Cody present a bizarro world socio-political dynamic where ALL liberals are wealthy, self-righteous blue bloods and ALL Republicans are highly honorable solely because they are ALL salt-of-the-Earth, dirt poor, vaguely racist individuals like Ricki herself and yet these are the only people who can truly understand the real transformative power of rock and roll. Excuse me while I gag.  

Which leads me to Meryl Sreep's actual performance, which is so showy, so blatantly insincere, so much of a painfully contrived "performance" that she is completely operating in state fair, grand prize salted HAM mode! Never for one moment does she delve under the skin of Ricki to try and make a character like this come off as anything resembling a living, breathing individual. Look, there really is a movie to be made with this material, a darker, tougher, exceedingly more honest film than the one on display here because "Ricki And The Flash" is so badly written, awkwardly directed, and not very well acted and unforgivably so. It is a film littered from top to bottom with the most ear aching dialogue in recent memory (and from a writer who knows better because she has done better) spilling from the mouths of actors unable to make (almost) any moment work or even be remotely compelling.  

Truth be told, I do have to give credit to Rick Springfield, who was indeed impressive, so much so that I could not hep but to wonder what the film would have been like if it was re-constructed (or better yet, entirely re-written and overhauled) so he was in the leading role. I think that with his longevity and musical chops, it could have made for something worthy, like a rock and roll version of Director Scott Cooper's "Crazy Heart" (2009), but "Ricki And The Flash" is what we're left with. Additionally, I also must give credit to Audra McDonald, who portrays Pete's second wife Maureen. Now, if anyone in this film provided a sense of gravity and realism, it was McDonald, who in one lengthy scene with Streep, nearly eats her alive with her command pummeling Streep's showboating hysterics.

With regards to Streep's singing in the film, as she does perform all of the band's songs, which are indeed very well filmed and presented by Demme, who certainly has had enough experience shooting concert sequences, she's good. That is not an issue at all in the film at all...well, except for the film's finale, which occurs at her son's wedding and I am certain that you can all easily figure out what Ricki's gift to her son actually is, and believe me it is just a howler in its execution.  

Dear readers, as I have expressed to you in the past, I see these things so you won't have to and Jonathan Demme's "Ricki And The Flash" is definitely one to seriously avoid. It is easily the worst film of 2015 so far as it is a giant vat of cliches and caricatures boiling so furiously, that I actually began wondering if the whole film was some sort of a cinematic dare or practical joke to see how bad of a film could they make that Meryl Streep would still receive awards recognition for.

While we still have to wait to find out if Streep is honored once again, and I realize that my opening challenge may be famous last words on my part, if she does miraculously pull nomination out of the awards season hat, the joke has unrepentantly been played upon me.