Written by Robin Hitchcock.
Meryl Streep is having the time of her life in Ricki and the Flash — playing rock star, acting alongside her daughter Mamie Gummer, macking on Rick Springfield, and wearing leather pants. Her joy is infectious, and lends an overall lighthearted tone to what could be a very sad movie about estranged families.
Streep plays Ricki Randazzo, formerly known as Linda Brummer back in her square suburban mother days. She left her marriage and her three children to escape intractable dissatisfaction; basically, imagine if Streep’s character in Kramer vs. Kramer went on to become frontwoman for a dive bar’s house band.
Ricki’s life is far from perfect: she struggles to get by with her cashier job at a Whole Foods stand-in, she won’t commit to her boyfriend/lead guitarist Greg, but she doesn’t seem to regret her life or her choices.
Then: a phone call. Her daughter Julie’s husband has abruptly left for her for another woman. She’s falling apart and “needs her mother,” a role Ricki hasn’t played in decades.
Mamie Gummer is fantastic in her role as Julie. She genuinely portrays the devastating depression of grief while milking plenty of humor from her character having absolutely zero fucks left to give. Streep and her daughter perfectly utilize their natural chemistry as Julie’s inability to play at normalcy jibes with Ricki’s counterculture vibe, both sticking out awkwardly behind the Brummer’s white picket fence.
There’s a fantastically tense dinner where Ricki’s also reunited with her sons Josh (Sebastian Stan) and Adam (Nick Westrate), who are revealed by Julie to be respectively engaged and gay, though they haven’t felt moved to tell their biological mother either of those things. As strained as Julie and Ricki’s relationship is, there’s a wider chasm between Ricki and her sons.
Even though Ricki does bond with Julie and with her ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline), Diablo Cody’s smart script avoids excessive sentimentality; it is clear that Ricki can never make up for lost time, and that her children will always have a family she’s not entirely a part of, including their seemingly perfect stepmother Maureen (Audra McDonald). Maureen is stunningly polite and kind when she basically kicks Ricki out of her house, and subsequently reaches out to Ricki with an invite to Josh’s wedding. I really liked seeing these two women not hate each other despite their obvious conflict, and Audra McDonald is really good in her few scenes.
At the big wedding in the end, everyone gets along despite some awkward moments, and when Ricki and the Flash crash the wedding stage (sorry, other band!) they get all the uptight rich people in their boogie shoes. (The third act felt a bit like a condensed version of director Jonathan Demme’s previous wedding movie, Rachel Getting Married.) We know it can’t really be happily ever after for this family, but there is hope for much-less-unhappily ever after.
A significant portion of the film’s run time is Ricki’s band rocking out, so if that’s not your jam, you might get bored (my husband sure did). But director Jonathan Demme has made some incredible concert movies (Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold), and he puts those talents to use here. And giving the band significant screen time allows us to see the joy in Ricki’s life, so she’s not just some pathetic deadbeat mother who ruined her life. And also lets us see Meryl Streep sing “Bad Romance,” which is worth the price of admission.
Ricki and the Flash is not a movie of great consequence, but it is nearly perfect for what it is. Unless you’re a weirdo like my husband who hates rock ‘n’ roll, you should see it.
Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who was born in the same hospital as Meryl Streep.
