Movie Review: "Ricki And The Flash"

"Ricki And The Flash": B+.  I have always felt that movies about sports and movies about musicians generally suffer from similar flaws.  Sports movies tend to have weak on-the-field action shots.  An example is Hoosiers from 1986, a highly acclaimed film in almost all respects save for the fact that the basketball scenes are ridiculously fake.  The players look more like they're going through a choreography than actually playing hoops.  The football action in 1993's Rudy appears more like an intra-mural powder puff scrum.  Likewise, music films need good soundtracks, but the weaker stories are those where you might hear the same song repeatedly, or sub-minute snippets of a few other songs purportedly played by the actors.  I suspect reconciling the payment of expensive royalties with the movie's budget has a lot to do with it. Eddie And The Cruisers from 1983 is a film which received lukewarm reviews.  The story is about a band but, ironically, the music is a weakness in most critics' views.

Happily, Ricki And The Flash does not suffer that defect, and it's one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much.  One could easily make the argument that the music is the best part of the film.  I found myself foot-tapping throughout.  Meryl Streep is the title character, the leader of, and only woman in, a five person band, the Flash.  They're the house band at a blue collar bar in Tarzana, California, playing old school rock covers.  The role of lead guitarist Greg is rendered nicely by Rick Springfield who, in real life, is a rocker who has enjoyed a long career as a performer.  Ricki is dirt poor, living in a one star motel but fulfilling her dream of being a "rock star," at least in her eyes.  She is not delusional, but she enjoys what she's doing and that's all that counts.  She's living the life she has always wanted to live.

That enjoyment is disrupted when she receives a phone call from her ex-husband, Pete (smooth Kevin Kline), the father of her three adult children who all live in Indianapolis.  Their daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer, Streep's real life daughter) is distraught and depressed because her husband is leaving her for another woman.  At the behest of Pete, Ricki uses her entire meager savings for plane fare to Indy.  Upon Ricki's arrival at Pete's house, Julie storms down the stairs to the kitchen and greets her mother with this question: "Do you always dress like a hooker from Night Court?" Yes, the middle aged Ricki's appearance does resemble that of a poor man's Joan Jett.

At this point we get filled in on Ricki's history.  It is she who walked out on her family when her kids were in grade school, so that she could pursue rock stardom in LA.  Her real name is Linda.  She's making so little money at her music gigs that she desperately needs her day job as a cashier at Whole Foods, where her twenty-something male boss is dissatisfied with her conversations with the patrons who come through her line.  "You need to enhance your customer's experience."

Meanwhile, Pete has done extremely well for himself and lives in a sprawling house in an upper-crust neighborhood.  After Ricki walked out on Pete and the kids twenty years ago, he soon remarried.  His second wife, Maureen (Audra McDonald), is everything Ricki is not: classy, dignified, refined, elegant and educated.  And unlike Ricki, she is a cook extraordinaire.  It is Maureen who has raised the kids, while Ricki found little time from two thousand miles away to stay even tangentially involved in her kids' lives.

On the second night of Ricki's return, Pete unwisely decides to host a family dinner at a white tablecloth restaurant.  The mercurial Julie will be there, along with her gay brother and her engaged brother and his fiancé.  As they are seated in the center of the elegant room, you know this is a bad idea, and things will not go well.  It is fun to watch the uneasiness at the table, which only gets worse when the engaged brother and his fiancé make attempts to rationalize Riki's omission from the invited wedding guests list.

The movie was written by Diablo Cody, who has won an Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay for 2007's Juno.  The Ricki script has two particularly well-written dialogue scenes.  The first is a reserved showdown between Maureen, who has just returned from Seattle to tend to her ailing father, and Ricki, who the day before convinced Julie to skip her much-needed therapy session so the two could hang out at the salon.  It is noteworthy and laudable for McDonald that the viewer can't tell which of the two actresses on the screen is appearing in her first major motion picture and which is a veteran actress who has been nominated for nineteen (!) Oscars, more than any actor or actress in film history.

The second scene with especially good dialogue is a short one between Ricki and her lead guitarist, Greg.  He is attempting to convince Ricki to eat some humble pie and accept a last-minute invitation to her son's wedding, even though she feels unloved by her family.  "Your kids' job is not to love you.  But it is your job to love them."  Springfield may be a rocker, but he's a convincing actor too.

From the opening barroom song, Tom Petty's American Girl, to the last scene, Ricki And The Flash provides what I'm most interested in when I plop down in my theater chair, viz., entertainment.  Kudos to the actors for playing their own instruments on ten songs, and doing their own vocals.