Dicks: The Musical (2023) – Absolutely Nuts

Released: 7th December
Seen: 5th December

In 2014 Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson put on a two-man show called F***ing Identical Twins. The show ended up being noticed by someone at 20th Century Fox and was bought in 2016 with the intent of being turned into a musical… and then the Fox-Disney merger happened, a lot of projects got thrown around like metaphors in a desperate writer’s head and soon the project landed at A24 where it got a rename, a high-end cast complete with Tony and Emmy winners galore and legendary comedy director Larry Charles. With a combination like that behind it, it should’ve been inevitable that Dicks: The Musical would turn out to be one of the funniest movies to hit cinemas in recent years.

Dicks: The Musical takes the plot of The Parent Trap and violates it in the most brutal ways imaginable. Centering on Craig (Josh Sharp) and Trevor (Aaron Jackson), two fucking identical twins who were separated at birth by their parents just because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Craig and Trevor have grown up to be misogynistic assholes who only care about fucking, making money and using that money to help them find new people to fuck. They end up meeting due to a merger of their companies forcing them to be near each other and soon come up with a plan to reunite their family, getting their father Harris (Nathan Lane) and mother Evelyn (Megan Mullally) to get back together and marry. It won’t be easy though, they’ll have to deal with their powerful boss Gloria (Megan The Stallion), appease God (Bowen Yang) and perhaps most importantly of all… don’t upset the sewer boys.

Dicks: The Musical is what happens if someone who claimed they hated musicals while secretly loving musicals wrote a musical about a film they half-remembered from the late 90s and it’s absolutely fucking glorious. From the moment the opening text comes up to alert the audience that the main roles will be two gay men playing straight characters and they should be considered brave for doing so, you should be aware of what film you’re sitting in because if you don’t laugh at that opening text then you’re probably not going to be the right person for this kind of film. It’s that rare case of intentional camp that actually works, Dicks: The Musical is joyfully catering to an audience who will get a kick out of the strange parody laid before them and it knows it.

Any person who knows a single thing about classic musicals will adore the playful kick in the nuts the genre is getting here, from the classic introduction song including an elaborate description of comically long cocks (“I’ll Always Be On Top”) to the passionate love duet sung between a gay man and a woman without a pussy (“Desperate For Your Love”), every single song is taking a classic element of the format and pushing it to the illogical extreme just to see what happens. Sharp and Jackson clearly understand the basic rules of a musical and how to construct one so they’ve taken that knowledge of standard generic musical structure and just pissed all over it because it’s very fucking funny to do exactly that.

Hell, it’s not just the script that’s having a laugh at the genre conventions, even the basic rules of cinema get to be mocked here. Split screens are used to huge comedic effect in subtle ways, dolly tracks are pointedly visible to make it very clear how fake everything is and if a character needs to just tell the editors what to do to get a scene moving, they’ll do it because why not? The people making Dicks: The Musical get that this is not some serious prestige piece (It’s called Dicks: The Musical, for fuck’s sake) so they’re going to have fun with the rules that most films of this genre would abide by no matter what.

Dicks: The Musical moves at a brisk pace, not letting the audience settle for even a minute. It’s throwing jokes out every chance it can and it’s going to make damn sure one of them lands. Hell, in the screening I went to people were laughing so hard they could easily miss other jokes that were being lobbed out, that’s how regularly they were just nailing the comedy. It’s quick, it’s zany and it’s offensive without being mean about it. The offensive comedy is also brilliantly handled because it’s never punching down, only up and knows how to make the edgy jokes work… almost like you can still do these shocking jokes without being cruel about it, wild. If anything the people who are going to be offended are the ones who call everyone else snowflakes since the brunt of the jokes are aimed at people like them or their precious God (hope you like hearing God being called a faggot a lot because that’s an entire musical phrase in this glorious bad boy).

The thing that sells all this, all the absolute insanity being presented before the willing audience, is a cast who have all made wildly different performance choices that somehow work cohesively. Aaron and Josh are clearly the newbies still acting for the back row of a theater, pushing their expressions so far that it looks absolutely insane which makes it hilarious. Nathan Lane is taking the role seriously like he’s going to get another Tony for this, basically playing the straight man of the cast which is in itself fucking hilarious. Megan The Stallion is just playing herself with a different name but that’s also what she’s best at so you had better believe that she steals the show when she’s on screen (which is not nearly enough). Bowen Yang as God feels like he had a week to work out a character on SNL and is just working it out for the first time but because Bowen Yang is objectively hilarious, he pulls it off, and is clearly living his best life right at the finale of this piece.

The undeniable standout is Megan Mullally as the eccentric Evelyn, which is just Megan showing off every skill she possesses every time she’s on screen. Her character voice is so weird that it shouldn’t work but it absolutely does, she looks insane in a way that’s both unbelievable and also completely captivating, and let’s not forget those vocal chops. It feels like the people making this knew they had that powerhouse voice that could do glorious silly things like “Evelyn’s Song” but could also just belt for the rafters and bring a surprising amount of emotion when the time comes to sing about how “Lonely” she is. Megan gets all the best lines, the best song, the best visual joke, the best costumes, she’s 4th billed but also the actual star of this thing, and if awards season was cool, she’d be in some serious conversations for this.

Look, I’m not going to pretend that Dicks: The Musical is for everyone, I’m sure there are some boring people out there who are going to dislike it and that’s totally fine. Those people can go enjoy their boring films full of accountants and straight people. I’m going to be over here enjoying my filthy gay musical about identical twins that breaks every taboo you can think of while delivering some toe-tapping tunes and almost had me falling out of my chair from pure laughter. Dicks: The Musical is clearly a cult film, it wants that title and it deserves it because it’s absolutely fucking hilarious.