Larry Charles (Borat) conducts an uproarious musical-comedy riff on The Parent Trap that follows a pair of identical twins who conspire to reunite their divorced and disturbingly deranged parents (Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally).
There’s no business like show business — except perhaps the business of selling the bristles and brushes for robot vacuums, a cutthroat industry that pits “confident heterosexual” salesmen like Craig and Trevor against each other on a daily basis. But before Craig can shove a hose in Trevor’s mouth and turn on the water, these two big-dicked blowhards come to the startling realization that they are fucking identical twins raised apart since birth.
Fortunately, these are the perfect conditions to mount an old-fashioned parent trap, and so the pair swap lives to restore the nuclear family that they have long been denied. But can love still bloom between their eccentric mother (Megan Mullally), who is so old she carries her vagina around in a purse, and their closeted father (Nathan Lane), who is obsessively preoccupied with cannibalistic, humanoid, underground-dwelling sewer boys? Hey, I ain’t bringing around a cloud to rain on their parade, not with songs this catchy and choreography that features Megan Thee Stallion domming worker drones as she lays down bars about how she “out-alphas the alphas” in her midst.
Yes, Dicks: The Musical is a full-blown movie musical and it is proudly queer as fuck. Narrated by God (Bowen Yang) and adapted from a two-man stage show by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp, who turn in memorably manic performances as the titular twinsome dicks, this all-singing, all-dancing madness is also directed by comedy royalty Larry Charles (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Borat), so you can count on uproarious 11 o’clock numbers so unhinged, they go all the way to midnight.
PETER KUPLOWSKY
Official Selection, 2023 Toronto International Film Festival
Content advisory: sexual content, crude content, coarse language