RICKI AND THE FLASH
Although Meryl Streep has starred in the highest grossing musical of all time (Mamma Mia!), you wouldn’t expect her to be belting out covers of [soul singer] Dobie Gray’s Drift Away or Bruce Springsteen’s My Love Won’t Let You Down. Yet there she is, in Jonathan Demme’s new film, as Ricki, up on the stage of a down-at-heel bar in the San Fernando Valley, rocking out her dreams every night with her band, The Flash, her hair done up like Joan Jett just got out of bed.
And yes, that is Jessie’s Girl singer Rick Springfield accompanying her on guitar, although he’s not playing someone called Rick Springfield. He does play mean licks and is Ricki’s on-off lover, Greg.
They’re not a bad band at all, but success has clearly been hard to come by. When Ricki suddenly gets a call from her ex-husband (Kevin Kline) she flies to Indiana to see the family she walked out on many years ago, to help her daughter Julie whose marriage has just fallen apart. Depressed Julie is played my Mamie Gummer, Meryl’s real-life daughter, and the resemblance is striking, if not a little weird.
Anyway, there’s a family reunion from hell in a restaurant and all the resentment comes out, but Meryl’s Ricki gives as good as she gets – you really believe she was right to walk out on her comfy family to pursue her rock dreams and squeeze into leather trousers.
The film tos and fros and loses its zip. Meryl leaves her ex-husband’s gated community mansion and goes back to her Californian motel, then she comes back to Indiana again. There’s some tender motherdaughter late bonding and a flirtatious rekindling with Kline over some pot in the freezer, but there’s always a prickly edge to Demme’s film, although it’s hardly of the calibre of his Oscar triumph The Silence Of The Lambs. It’s a real curio of a movie for the director and for Streep, part drama, part comedy, part soap opera with karaoke.
Whatever the veering tone, Demme keeps things ticking over, Kline is not as insufferable as he has been of late (opposite Maggie Smith in My Old Lady, for example) and Streep is fabulous, even when being slightly silly. She can find the humanity in any character, an outlandish one, a monstrous one or a ridiculous one. So in her hands the film becomes a torch song for motherhood and a feminist cry for self-validation.
The film does end in a wedding (Demme’s 2008 film Rachel Getting Married comes flashing back to mind), where ends are tied and storylines converge. This is a bit clunky for someone as experienced as Demme, but he knows how to handle it and proves that a big singalong always works a reliable kind of old magic. Especially when it’s lead by Meryl Streep in cowboy boots.