Dicks: The Musical Is Never as Outrageous as It Wants to Be

Photo: A24

Craig and Trevor (Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson), the main characters of the anarchic but only intermittently funny Dicks: The Musical, are like Patrick Bateman if he took up song and dance while steering clear of thoughts of murder. They aren’t caricatures of straight male entitlement so much as they’re a form of exuberant cosplay, a pair of suit-wearing, bachelor pad-owning, sport fucking salesman who stride through their lives in New York like the place was built for them. They’re of a shared type, but in this case there’s a physical resemblance as well — the two happen to be identical twins who were separated at birth, and who reunite after becoming office rivals. Sharp and Jackson are gay men who approach the trappings of macho heterosexuality as a delightful novelty — tossing back stimulants, crooning about how well endowed they are, and jumping the line for taxis and coffees, something that inevitably involves cutting in front of a pregnant woman (or a whole string of them).

Dicks: The Musical is too committed to silliness to attempt any real sting with its central drag act, though you could argue that the film offers a deeper subversion. The ramshackle reality it conjures on screen is so profoundly un-straight that the movie ads lining the sidewalk tout offerings like My Queer Lady, The Gay Odd Couple, and a Grease riff with the tagline “Lube is the word.� Why bother satirizing straight men when they can simply be made to feel incidental? They’re so incidental that when Craig and Trevor decide to pull a Parent Trap on the divorced parents who split them up and raised them separately, they learn that their dad (Nathan Lane) has inconveniently come out as gay. They’re so incidental that when Craig and Trevor get fired for not showing up to work, their boss (played by Megan Thee Stallion) performs a song about out-alphaing the alphas while leading a pack of her remaining employees around by their ties. They’re so incidental that even Craig and Trevor themselves ultimately… well, that might count as a spoiler, though it’s hard to say what counts as meaningful plot development in a movie in which one character stores her genitals in her purse and another turns out to have been keeping mutants he found while roaming the sewer as pets.

Jackson and Sharp, who are both making their feature film debuts, originated what would become Dicks: The Musical at the old UCB Theatre on 26th Street, where it played as a half-hour show in which the pair played the brothers as well as their parents. They had to build out the script considerably from there, though Dicks: The Musical still feels thin as an 86-minute movie that struggles to maintain the manic pitch it begins with. Jackson and Sharp approach their roles as though they were human cartoon characters, with outsized expressions and every line delivered with extreme gusto. It’s wearying, though Lane, as their oddball father Harris, and Megan Mullally, as their even more eccentric mother Evelyn, provide some much needed modulation with performances that feel calibrated while still managing to be completely absurd. Director Larry Charles, a comedy veteran, leans into the surreality of the script by giving the film a look that’s deliberately artificial, all sound stages and sets that often looked barely glued together. This visual style means that when Harris introduces his Sewer Boys, the grumbling demons he keeps in a cage and feeds chewed up cold cuts from his own mouth, the gruesome puppets fit right in (and are the best part of the movie). But it also adds to the general feeling that everything is going to collapse into chaos before the closing credits.

Dicks: The Musical comes from the tradition of John Waters, though it has to work a lot harder for the transgressive glee that has always come so naturally to Waters’ work. It’s actually when poking fun at the conventions of gay piety that it sparks most visibly to life. The opening crawl, which affirms the film is “brave,� also somberly declares that it represents “the first time gay men have written anything.� Found families may be a regular feature in queer cinema, but Craig and Trevor are so obsessed with their lack of a traditional nuclear one that they declare that other arrangements don’t count. Harris defends his ownership of the Sewer Boys by howling, “They’re not disgusting! They’re gay culture!� The movie climaxes in a musical number that uses the acceptance slogan “All Love Is Love� to celebrate a romantic union that even God, played by Bowen Yang, admits is an abomination. Dicks: The Musical is never as outrageous as it clearly would like to be, even when it’s having Mullally sing about how her pussy fell off. But its determination to avoid any trace of self-importance or greater meaning is admirable in its own right — embracing the freedom to just be ridiculous.