Movie Review: 'Ricki and the Flash'

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) --- We think of Meryl Streep as the queen of movie drama.

But her extraordinary resume, highlighted by her Oscar-winning turns in Sophie's Choice, The Iron Lady, and Kramer vs. Kramer, also includes a healthy share of projects that showcase her comedic and musical talents as well, including Defending Your Life, Postcards from the Edge, Into the Woods, It's Complicated, Mamma Mia!, A Prairie Home Companion, Death Becomes Her, The Devil Wears Prada, and Manhattan.

In the musical comedy-drama, Ricki and the Flash, Streep plays a middle-aged rock star who tries to reconnect with her estranged daughter. Her title character, Ricki Rendazzo, bolted from family life years ago when, still named Linda Brummel, she decided to pursue her dream and become a rock star.

Now, twenty years later, she finds herself struggling financially, working by day as a checkout clerk in a supermarket and by night as the lead singer of a cover band in a Tarzana bar in the San Fernando Valley, belting out cover versions of classic rock tunes.

That's when her well-to-do ex-husband, Pete, played by Kevin Kline, contacts her in California in the name of one of their three children, their troubled daughter, Julie -- played by Streep's real-life daughter, Mamie Gummer – who's going through a crisis.  Pete asks her to return home to Indianapolis and help their daughter get through it and regain her balance.

Ricki/Linda also has two adult sons, played by Sebastian Stan and Nick Westrate, who are surely resentful of their mother's behavior but who seem to be thriving without her being in the picture all these years as they were being raised by their father's second wife, played by Audra MacDonald.

Veteran Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Rachel Getting Married, Swimming to Cambodia, The Manchurian Candidate), who's also done his share of music documentaries (including Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold), keeps the music as an important part of the narrative storytelling on tap.

The power of music surfaces as a crucial theme, especially in the third act.

However, there's something unfinished about the script, which screenwriter Diablo Cody, an Oscar winner for Juno, based on the experience of her real-life mother-in-law.  While it sets out to explore the touchy and explosive nuclear family dynamic at this years-later reunion, when the lead character gets to face the choices she has made willy-nilly, it doesn't follow through on this thrust as much as we'd like it to.

Rick Springfield plays Ricki's boyfriend and bandmate, the lead guitarist, and the band performs a dozen songs throughout the movie, all recorded live and a number of them played all the way through.

But perhaps the musical performances, as polished as the numbers are, steals focus from the family narrative, which is why the film stops instead of ends.

But don't blame the cast, because Gummer, Springfield, and MacDonald excel in support of the characteristically superb Streep, who challenges herself by playing a protagonist with plenty of off-putting characteristics.  She's after truth, not affection.

And, yes, true to form, that is Streep actually playing the rhythm guitar and seeming like she's ready to headline at clubs.  That's also her acting and singing, of course, and not only does she impress as a hard-edged rocker, but she does it while leading us commandingly through the film's pockets of surprisingly potent emotional intensity.

So we'll rock 2-1/2 stars out of 4 for Ricki and the Flash, an incomplete but absorbing and entertaining musical dramedy that shows flashes of brilliance.