Ricki And The Flash

Synopsis: A woman, Ricki Rendazzo (Meryl Streep). who gave up everything for her dream of rock-and-roll stardom visits the home of her former husband (Kevin Kline) after their adult daughter (Mamie Gummer) goes into a tailspin when her newly-minted husband leaves her.

I must admit I was sceptical going into this movie. With a script by Diablo Cody and Jonathan Demme directing one expects there to be some substantial horsepower under the hood. But while Meryl Streep is, as we know, America’s greatest screen actress, I really couldn’t see her as a rock chick of a certain age. Well, almost needless to say, I was wrong. It won’t go down as one of her great roles but as ever, she gives it her all.  The problem is actually with Cody’s script and Demme’s direction, a combination which hews so close to its feelgood template that it needs all of Streep’s commitment and Kline’s cocky charm to keep it from sinking in a slough of insipidity.

Cody who gave us the refreshingly smart-with-heart Juno (2007) and the wickedly dark comedy, Young Adult (2011) not to mention the highly regarded television series, United States Of Tara, seems to have completely lost her mojo with a script that is both formulaic in conception and superficial in execution, whilst Demme who, of course, won an Oscar for one of Hollywood’s modern classic thrillers, The Silence Of The Lambs, pours on the sentimentality like maple syrup over waffles. In a very American way, Ricki And The Flash is a flavor-saturated dish designed to stimulate the taste-buds rather than satisfy a hunger.

Our hunger would have been for the story of a woman who gave up middle-class conventionality to pursue her love of music and the price, in every sense, which she paid, and which she continues to pay many years later, as the dream grows ever flimsier. This potentially strong idea lies at the core of Cody’s script but it is shoehorned into a feelgood triumph of love over gold story, an ersatz fantasy of rapprochement in which long-held wounds are miraculously healed with, in a direly familiar way, the entire discordant village finally coming together to the strains of a Bruce Springsteen cover. 

For yes, for all the trumpeting about Ricki's musical aspirations, "Ricki and The Flash" is a covers band who have a residency at an L.A, bar where they crank out the same songs to the same crowd of losers week after week. Despite attracting universal clucking disapproval from her husband's mid-Western milieu, Patti Smith she is not. She's more Bonnie Tyler than Bonnie Raitt and even then, without the hit records.  It’s sad really and this would seem to be prime material for Cody’s characteristically acerbic take on the female condition but under Demme’s direction there is little attempt to imbue the story with real substance other than briefly in the relationship between Ricki and Greg, her band’s guitarist, played by 80s pop star and one-time member of the 70s Australian band, Zoot, Rick Springfield. In fact, perhaps because Cody's script gave him little to work with, Demme seems to pretty much lose interest in Ricki's relationship with her estranged family, preferring rather to fill in time with her and her boys rockin' out in a build-up to the big finale.

Ricki And The Flash is an expertly-packaged mainstream Hollywood entertainment and enjoyable as such but the pity is, it could have been so much more.

FYI: Aside from Springfield, the rest of Ricki's band are also well-known musos: drummer Joe Vitale, keyboardist Bernie Worrell and bassist Rick Rosas, who died shortly after filming was completed and to whom the film is dedicated.

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