by Diablo Cody
Sony Pictures Entertainment

Continuing our “Summer of movies about women” we have a… dude, it’s almost a coming of age/getting your shit together (kind of) movie about an older woman, and the children she left behind.

Meryl Streep plays Ricki Randazzo, an aging front woman with her band The Flash. They’re the house band for a hole-in-the-wall bar outside of LA where they play mostly covers of classic rock and roll, but occasionally break out into newer songs (Seriously, La Meryl breaking out into Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance?” Worth the ticket price right there). Her lead guitar is Greg (Rick Springfield), and they have a….nebulous… relationship.

She gets a call from her ex-husband, Pete, in Indiana (Kevin Kline, who got old at some point, when did that happen?), telling her that her daughter, Julie (Mamie Gummer, Meryl’s actual daughter), has just been left by her husband. She hasn’t been to see them in a LONG time (she didn’t even go to Julie’s wedding), and Pete has long since remarried to Maureen (Audra MacDonald, seriously the casting of this movie is perfection). Basically she’s returning to a Midwestern powderkeg.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen basically all the plot points of the movie. Ricki needs to come to terms with how her actions have affected her kids, and all three of the now-adult children are all angry with their mother (and this is the long-simmered rage of childhood resentment that you wear like a second skin) but they all express it in different ways. Pete still has affection for Ricki, and Maureen has a lot of complicated feelings towards her.

The trailers make you think the main story is about Ricki’s reconciliation with her daughter, and that is a big part, but it’s really about Ricki forgiving herself. She wanted to make a go at her music career, and she didn’t feel like she could have both her family and her music, and she chose music. Selfish? Yes. Wrong? Maybe. Would the answer be different if she’d been successful at music, and/or been a dude? Honestly, it probably would be.

Also, Meryl Streep is a 66 year old woman, and she’s allowed to be a sexual human (she’s gets it on with Rick Springfield, lucky girl). And Rick Springfield gets to be the one delivering the “Pick me, choose me, love me” speech, hoping that this woman he adores will just fucking commit, already.

I think the relationship that was the most interesting was the one between Ricki and Maureen. They don’t share a lot of screen time together, but they have one of the most deliciously layered conversations between and current and former spouse that I’ve ever seen, and both Meryl and Audra kill it. Maureen respects that Ricki is her kids’ mother, but Maureen is the one who actually did the parenting.

This is directed by Jonathan Demme, who you may remember from such movies as The Silence of the Lambs and Rachel Getting Married, and written by Diablo Cody (Juno, The United States of Tara, and a TBD Sweet Valley High project which better happen). The great thing about Demme is that he will let great actors just react. He’s not afraid to hold a shot on someone’s face so we can watch them think and feel and absorb what someone’s saying. Cody is great at dialogue, and parts of this movie are drawn from her own mother-in-law.

My biggest issue is that the pacing was uneven, and there wasn’t a lot of a through line. Yeah, it’s the story of how Ricki got her shit together, but her sons aren’t very developed. The actors do a great job of conveying where they are, but the script doesn’t give them much to work with. Things happen without a lot of cause-and-effect, and it’s unclear how the climax is pulled off.

I do like Mamie Gummer (and she is not the proof of illegal human cloning that Colin Hanks so clearly is), and this is the third time she and Meryl have acted together, so I would assume they enjoy working with each other.

This was a very pleasant hour and forty minutes, and a welcome break from the summer blockbuster “shit blows up movies” (I love shit blowing up movies, but sometimes you just wanna see a comedy). I just kind of wish it had done more.

Ricki and the Flash is in theaters now and you can find tickets (US) at Moviefone and Fandango.