Ricki and the Flash
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.