Riding the very thin line between musical-comedy gold and obnoxious garbage, the long-running stage show F**king Identical Twins: The Musical from writers/performers Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp has been adapted by the pair into Dicks: The Musical, directed by Larry Charles (Borat, many episodes of Seinfeld). The in-your-face production centers on two self-obsessed businessmen named Craig (Sharp) and Trevor (Jackson), who are most definitely straight (they actually aren’t) and have centered their entire lives on accumulating wealth and seducing the ladies. When they both get hired at the same company (run by Gloria, played with appropriate boss-bitch flair by Megan Thee Stallion), they meet for the first time and discover they are long-lost identical twins (the fact that they don’t look alike shouldn’t be a distraction at all), each one raised by on of their long-divorced, highly eccentric parents (Nathan Lane’s Harris and Megan Mullally as Evelyn).
This entire musical contains some of the raunchiest, most depraved songs; some of them are actually very funny, especially Lane’s song in which he reveals that he’s got a pair of strange creatures called the Sewer Boys locked up in his home that he seems to have an intimate relationship with. And as much as I enjoy the idea of SNL’s Bowen Yang playing a flamboyantly gay God on paper, outside of his fiercely loud costumes, the song he showcases isn’t that impressive.
I spent a great deal of Dicks: The Musical waiting to see if the next song would be better than the last one, and occasionally one would hit the mark. But more often than not, it was a throwaway line or ad lib or background visual gag (a parody marquee featuring the latest A24 hit was one of my favorite of these) that got the biggest reaction out of me, and not the main story or a whole song or an overplayed performance. I love that Lane seems particularly confused as to why he’s in this movie in the first place, and while he’s certainly never been above occasionally straying into vulgar jokes and songs in his career, this one might a bit much even for his most devoted admirers. I certainly was never offended by the film, and I applaud its absurdist tendencies. I even appreciate the energy that Sharp and Jackson bring to the work (if I’m not mistaken, they played all the roles in the stage version). But the honest truth is that I didn’t laugh much, and that’s the bar by which I measure the most harshly.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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