Review: It’s Not Disgusting, It’s Gay Culture
'Dicks: The Musical' is a nasty little Sewer Boy of a movie
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰½
Romance: ✰
Sex: ✰✰½
Storytelling: ✰✰½
Performance: ✰✰✰½
Yearning: ✰✰✰
Thank you to A24 and ‘Dicks: The Musical’ for having us to an early press screening this week at the Angelika in NYC and Landmark E Street Cinema in DC. The movie goes to broad release on October 20th!
This review contains *very light* spoilers (you can read without watching)!
Written by Meg Steinfeld-Heim
Honestly, Dicks: The Musical was way less about literal, physical dicks than I expected it to be. I readied myself for a queer Sausage Party, ie. something very sexually grotesque and overly phallic—maybe I was just still seeing peen from my recent viewing of Rotting in the Sun—but in actuality, it was gross in an entirely different way. And the way it was gross was incredibly *~random*~!
Let me backtrack a little bit. Dicks: The Musical is loosely inspired by The Parent Trap and is an adaptation of a long-running, 30-minute UCB show that screenwriters and co-stars Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp regularly performed together in “the basement of a Gristedes” (their words). It centers around two virile, straight adult men who are living nearly identical lives: they are both extremely successful, macho assholes and are both Tops (salesman, that is) for their respective branches of a robot vacuum parts company. (We are just getting started with the silly.) They’re even neighbors, living in buildings 69A and 69B on their unnamed street. Oh, and they’re also estranged identical twins who were separated at birth.
Both boys are profoundly suffering the long term effects of a single-parent home. When their companies surprise-merge and our two dicks go head to head, the pieces begin to fall into place. This kicks off one of my favorite musical numbers, where the two express that no one in the world has ever experienced what they’re experiencing, except for each other—or as they put it, “Nobody understands but we”. They have just one goal: to reunite their parents, no matter how incompatible, and finally build the intact family home that they never had.
This is how we get introduced to the rest of their world: basically, the only rule is that everyone is totally whacko. The twins’ mother, Evelyn, played by Megan Mullally (Will & Grace, Parks & Recreation), is a caricature of…dementia? Mental illness? Disability? All of her lines are translated through a put-upon speech impediment that is basically her trying to talk with her tongue out of her mouth. The twins’ father Harris, portrayed by our Lord and Savior Nathan Lane, gives us our first explicit act of queerness in the movie, which is, of course, owning two Sewer Boys who he keeps caged in his living room and feeds fresh deli ham from Ziplock baggies.
I’ll take this moment to say: you can definitely feel the Borat in this Chili’s tonight. Dicks: The Musical is directed by Larry Charles, who’s stacked resume (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Borat) totally befits the gonzo vibes. Just understand that offensive is the baseline that we’re operating from here. Dicks is accessing the sort of freedom that comes with totally taking the wheels off and being completely obscene. That is the only throughline—so if that doesn’t resonate, then this movie isn’t for you!
The first half of the film is slower and not quite as funny, because it needs to contextualize what was originally ever-escalationg improv and translate it into a feature length script. It makes total sense why this material thrived on a short act comedy stage; in a setting like that, the audience has bought into the structure and is already planning to “yes-and” right alongside you. But as a movie, it’s a little bit harder to get into from the jump, so the jokes don’t land quite as much right away. The style of comedy is 100% all out—you cannot say that they aren’t taking risks! I think it's when Jackson and Sharp finally establish the world and how not-right the twins’ parents are for each other that the jokes become more complimentary of the story and a little more gratifying.
Every male character in this movie makes me think of a slightly-effeminate seventh grade boy, furiously insisting that he is not gay!! A handful of very funny title cards at the start of the movie inform us that our homosexual co-stars, Joshua and Aaron, will be playing heterosexual men and reminds us of just how brave that is. Parodying heterosexual culture is one of the few things we gays have, and this movie is a constant reminder to be grateful of that. In a similar tone, Lane’s first scene is a jazzy coming-out number (“It’s a Gay Old Life Being Queer”), performed in his fabulous Manhattan apartment and in a fabulous outfit. It’s also worth mentioning that the movie is narrated by a yassified, bedazzled God (played by Bowen Yang). Bowen introduces himself at the top of the movie as “God, He/Him”. There is nothing quite like the thoughtful act of sharing pronouns, but also definitively stating that God is a man. I’m just glad someone finally said it.
The boys swap places to meet their parents and get to know them, and to pull this off they wear terrible, terrible wigs. I love Dicks: The Musical’s embrace of an almost stylized laziness. The whole film says, “let's just portray whatever we’re going for—whether that is New York City, a twin in disguise or a puppet of a Sewer Boy—and let’s make it look really shitty and just own that.” So by this I mean New York City is just barely New York City. There are movie theaters and city hall-esque buildings featured that you don’t recognize because this was very obviously shot on a soundstage in Chicago. It’s fun to be stupid!
My bi-curious queen Megan Thee Stallion absolutely eats as the twins’ ferocious, anti-man boss at the vacuum parts company, Vroomba. Her musical number is so good it should be released as a single, and I’ll be thinking about the line, “my tuna is Ahi, my beef is Wagyu” for a long time. She utilizes the incredibly fun, theatrical dancers dressed as office workers/janitors/average citizens and appropriately walks them like dogs by their business-casual belts.
I love that this movie is just totally free of a message, but still asks important questions like, “Does short hair on a man make him look like a lesbian girl?” Regular readers of The Yearning will know that I maintain gay people need bad movies, too—and they also deserve dumb ones! I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I will say—all roads eventually lead to gay. And the ending also makes me think about those viral TikTok videos last year where two donor-conceived women in a relationship discovered that they might be related…
Dicks: The Musical will be available in select theaters October 6th, and will be premiering in theaters nationwide on October 20th. Look up showtimes near you here.
Wait. Larry Charles...WHY ARE THERE TWO LARRYS
Incredible review right here. I both want to watch this very badly and also don’t want to watch it at all! :-0 not a fan of Larry David...