Actress Mamie Gummer says her Academy Award-winning mother Meryl Streep always offers sound advice, whether it’s solicited or not. Ricki, whose real name is Linda, is a failed Bonnie Raitt, and she’s a star only in one obscure California bar, where she and her guitarist boyfriend, Greg (Rick Springfield), front a geezer cover band.
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We already knew that Streep could sing, as evidenced in “Postcards From the Edge”, “Into the Woods“, “Mamma Mia” and other films in her four-decade repertoire.
Streep doesn’t even have an on-screen moment with her daughter as good as those two special scenes. Mamie Gummer has the plum role of Julie, Ricki’s depressed and angry offspring.
She can do it all. (Literally. Check out the Tea Party tattoo on her upper torso.) Her sons are repelled by Ricki, especially gay Adam (Nick Westrate), who bears the brunt of those dated Baby Boomer biases of hers. As Pete’s longtime second wife, the usually magnificent Audra McDonald has to deliver the screenplay’s worst long speech, and she never quite recovers. It settles instead for a kind of final orgy of acceptance set to classic rock, which works nicely but doesn’t answer the question: What’s the point?
But in a movie predicated on staging one scene of conflict after another, the biggest conflict seems to have occurred between what director Jonathan Demme was interested in filming (live-music performances) and what screenwriter Diablo Cody was interested in writing about (emotional confrontations between family members). He wouldn’t cuddle her when she came home because he was so cross, and that stayed with her.
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What was interesting for Meryl was the way people have approached her character. What makes “Ricki and the Flash” Cody’s worst misstep so far is that, while it fails to acknowledge the reality of anyone or anything outside of Ricki, it offers very little insight into what makes this woman tick, either. Now playing at the Beaucatcher, Biltmore Grande and Carolina theaters.
