Review: Dicks: The Musical Is a Really Long Comedy Sketch

Dicks: The Musical is designed to provoke. This is a movie-musical featuring an animated loose-leaf vagina, Bowen Yang as a flamboyantly gay God, and an outer-limits satire of the #LoveIsLove trope that seems specifically engineered to make lost-cause opponents of same-sex marriage scream, “I told you so!” But will it? A torrent of public outrage is likely the only thing that can rescue Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s queer spin on The Parent Trap from the eventual obscurity it deserves.

Jackson and Sharp are veterans of New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade, a sketch-comedy theater where they debuted their half-hour two-hander musical Fucking Identical Twins, which is the basis for Dicks. It’s about Craig (Sharp) and Trevor (Jackson), two alpha-male heterosexuals (neither Sharp nor Jackson are particularly convincing on that front, for reasons that become dramaturgically justifiable later in the film). They’re identical twins separated at birth, something they only realize following the merger of the competing robotic vacuum cleaner firms for which they work as salesmen. They plot to reunite their kooky shut-in mother (Megan Mullally) and vintage homosexual father (Nathan Lane). It’s a seemingly impossible task that could have pushed this film to dizzying heights of farcical lunacy. Sadly, it does not.

Rapper Megan Thee Stallion makes her feature film debut in the superfluous role of Gloria, their boss at Vroomba. The plot suspends for four minutes so she can perform in a Megan Thee Stallion music video so dripping with misandry, the girls and gays in the audience will surely want to shout “yaaasss queen” in response (they did not at the screening I attended).

Lisping, clad in an outrageous hat (marvelously over-the-top costumes by Valerie Klarich), and confined to a Jazzy, Mullally seems to be playing a lost character from Dear World. Her scenes with Lane are revolting in all the right ways, displaying a level of commitment to circumstance and objective no matter how absurd.

Lane delivers the best bit of the whole film when he spits masticated deli meat into the mouths of his two pet “sewer boys” (appropriately grotesque puppets by Zach Silverstein). It’s a hilarious send-up of the maternal relationship so many gay men develop with their pets, and Lane treats it with the seriousness required to make it truly funny.

The same cannot be said for our two leading men, who hold their own material at arms-length, always in on the joke, poised to break character as a cheap ploy to get the audience to laugh along with them. Cinema is a different beast than live theater, of course; although like attending a performance of your friend’s sketch comedy troupe, Dicks is probably a lot funnier if you’re inebriated.

The mostly forgettable songs (by Jackson, Sharp, Karl Saint Lucy, and Marius De Vries) parody musical theater convention without resorting to cringey references to Hamilton or Dear Evan Hansen. I particularly enjoyed an inspirational, pick-yourself-up-and-try-again number steeped in rape culture, in which the chorus modulates on the lyric “no means yes.” This is the kind of transgressive writing that has something to offend everyone, and to make those who are not offended laugh our asses off. Sadly, it’s in short supply in Dicks.

Could director and regular Sacha Baron Cohen collaborator Larry Charles have done more to save this half-baked concept from becoming the mildly funny movie it turned out to be? Probably not. The production design (by Steve Wolff) instantly places this film in a nonspecifically retro New York of the imagination, complete with fake show posters that will have the Broadway faithful snorting, if ever so briefly. Other sight gags land thanks to Al LeVine’s well-timed editing. Despite this, Sharp and Jackson’s script regularly references how cheap and fake it all looks — a guaranteed laugh line when you’re producing under a Gristedes on West 26^th Street, but less so when you’re distributed worldwide under the banner of A24, the studio that produced last year’s Academy Award-winning Best Picture.

The problems with Dicks: The Musical originate entirely with the screenplay, which spreads the amount of laughter one might find in an 8-minute SNL sketch over the course of 86 minutes. I attended a screening with a very friendly, very queer audience (tank tops in October!) and no one was rolling in the aisles. If this target audience is underwhelmed, and a wider audience is unlikely to even discover this movie in the teeming sea of algorithmically distributed content that now constitutes American entertainment, Dicks is destined to shrivel.