Ricki and the Flash

Film Review by Josh Slater-Willams | 22 Dec 2015
Film title: Ricki and the Flash
Director: Jonathan Demme
Starring: Meryl Streep, Mamie Gummer, Kevin Kline, Rick Springfield, Sebastian Stan, Nick Westrate, Audra McDonald, Hailey Gates
Release date: Dec 28
Certificate: 12

Working from a screenplay by Diablo Cody, Ricki and the Flash feels like a compendium of director Jonathan Demme’s career trademarks. In setup and execution, it comes across as a blend of his sorely underrated Rachel Getting Married and his various rock docs, with a pinch of Something Wild. Ricki star Meryl Streep doesn’t don a massive white suit à la David Byrne in Stop Making Sense, sadly.

Streep (on point with her most fun lead turn in years) is a bankrupt musician given a chance to reconnect with the family she abandoned for dreams of rock-and-roll stardom. Kevin Kline plays the ex-husband while Streep's real-life progeny, Mamie Gummer, doubles as her onscreen daughter, who's expressing suicidal urges following her recent divorce.

Ricki’s not a patch on those earlier-cited Demme works, but few films so heavy on bickering are quite as strangely relaxing as this deceptively slight gem from one of American cinema’s great humanists.

Released by Sony Pictures Home Ent.