Oct 26, 20233 min read

Dicks: The Musical’ gleefully embraces its grossness

Directed by: Larry Charles

Starring: Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson, Nathan Lane, Megan Mullally, Bowen Yang, Megan Thee Stallion, Tom Kenny

Opening on: October 6, 2023

Larry Charles, the man who worked with Sacha Baron Cohen to bring us movies like Borat, Bruno, and The Dictator, sets his sights on the big screen musical in this not-so-subtle twist on The Parent Trap. Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp — the creators of the play upon which the film is based — play a pair of competing businessmen who discover they’re long-lost identical twins and decide to swap identities in order to bring their divorced parents back together.

A single page of sparse notes taken during a preview screening of “Dicks: The Musical” — during which the hosting venue, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, offered two free cocktails to critics and guests — suggests one of two things, or perhaps both. First: There just isn’t a whole lot to say about this deliberately lowbrow, gleefully low-budget expansion of Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s half-hour stage play, originally performed by the duo in 2015 under the auspices of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv and sketch comedy group. And second: The complimentary drinks may have had the desired effect.

I only managed to scribble a few barely legible words. But first, a bit of synopsis:

The “Parent Trap”-like plot centers on two vacuum cleaner salesmen, Trevor and Craig (Jackson and Sharp), who discover they’re identical twins — they look nothing alike — after being raised separately by their divorced parents, Harris and Evelyn (Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally). The brothers’ ruse to reunite Mom and Dad, which forms the basis of the slapdash plot, involves wearing wigs so that each man can masquerade as the other: wigs that are described, quite accurately, as “fake and s----y looking.”

Those are almost the only words I wrote in my notebook, a characterization that is later repeated about many other things in the film, which has the production values of an NSFW web comedy short stretched out to feature length. That “fake” list includes fake beards; a fake CGI animated flying vagina, which is said to have fallen off Evelyn’s body; and a pair of obvious puppets that represent “sewer boys,” the diaper-clad subterranean monsters that Harris is raising in his home as pets, and which he feeds by masticating lunchmeat and then regurgitating it into their mouths. Mullally, who delivers her lines with something halfway between a lisp and facial paralysis, seems to be having just as much fun as Lane.

The regurgitating thing is kind of gross, I’ll admit. But it is not the grossest or most transgressive bit of humor in “Dicks,” which shuttles so regularly between the just plain silly and the downright offensive, it could have earned frequent flier miles.

This self-conscious yet unapologetic embrace of the film’s, er, rough edges is one of its charms, which are modest but not negligible. (Yes, dear reader, I laughed two or three times. And not just because my standards had been relaxed by alcohol.) The title refers to the fact that Jackson and Sharp, who are gay, play hyper-macho, heterosexual jerks. Their kind-of-funny opening musical number, “I’ll Always Be on Top,” skewering alpha male posturing and braggadocio, is a far cry from the brilliant satiric sophistication and smarts of, say, “Barbie.”

In the film’s defense, I’m pretty sure that writers Jackson and Sharp and director Larry Charles, who earned fame as a “Seinfeld” writer before going on to direct “Borat” and other less hilarious Sacha Baron Cohen films, don’t want to be associated with anything that smacks of sophistication, smarts or seriousness.

A couple of fun cameos: Megan Thee Stallion as Trevor and Craig’s boss, and Bowen Yang as God — shirtless in a shimmering shorts suit, biker hat and platform boots. (The film’s closing number, “All Love Is Love,” which refers to the Creator by a homophobic slur and was written by Marius de Vries and Karl Saint Lucy, takes the definition of tolerance to a new level.)

You don’t have to sing along with the chorus, which includes the line “All love is gross.” But you can take the larger point.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong crude sexual material, graphic nudity, pervasive coarse language and brief drug use. 86 minutes.