Demme: Ricki and the Flash (2015)

Over the last couple of years, it’s felt as if Meryl Streep has become more subsumed into her star image than ever before. From August: Osage County to It’s Complicated to Into The Woods, it’s felt more and more as if Streep is simply playing Streep, only inhabiting such luminaries as Julia Child or Margaret Thatcher for the frisson of how they clarify and distill her own particular charisma in the process. That’s not in itself a bad thing, since that kind of celebrity reflexivity is often what gives rise to the greatest melodramatic roles – August: Osage County comes to mind in particular – but it does make it refreshing to see Streep in a small-scale role like that afforded by Ricki and the Flash, a role that reminds you why she’s a great actress as well as a great star. On the face of it, however, it looks like yet another Meryl Streep joint, since the promotional campaign has painted it as something of a musical comeback film, which it is very pointedly and emphatically not. Instead, it is something of a homecoming film, featuring Streep as Lina (stage name: Ricki Rendazzo), an aging rock musician who’s called back to her family home when her daughter attempts suicide after being left by her husband. What ensues plays – at least superficially – as a quite tight three-act structure, with the first act devoted to Ricki’s descent on ex-husband Pete’s (Kevin Kline) mansion in L.A. to tend on daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer); the second act devoted to Ricki’s return to her own squalid digs on the East Coast and her relationship with guitarist Greg (Rick Springfield); and the third act devoted to her return to L.A. to attend the wedding of her estranged son, where she plays a version of Bruce Springsteen’s “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” in a kind of late echo of the opening credits of Philadelphia. As that might suggest, the film reimagines Rachel Getting Married as comedy, although in this case the amorphous digital cinematography is replaced by an affective promiscuity and generosity that makes each act feel like an intensification rather than a development of what has gone before, drawing on Demme’s credentials as concert director more explicitly than any of his films in the last twenty years. Combined with the somewhat improbable combination of Demme as director and Diablo Cody as screenwriter, that creates an infinitely forgiving touch that finds something to love in every character, relationship and moment, leading to some quite beautifully choreographed sequences between Streep, Kline and Gummer in particular, but also giving Streep permission to operate at full facial expressivity in ways that get to the heart of the uncanny, almost grotesque minutiae that made her beauty so unusual and striking in the first place, even if they have been somewhat airbrushed out of her late work, or at least stylised out of true visibility. Where Rachel Getting Married was suffused by a depressive inability to feel good that eventually turned into a consoling and collective ambience, Ricki and the Flash often feels like an effort to gauge just where the feelgood affect that characterised so much of Demme’s 80s and 90s backdrop has gone by now, which is not to say that it’s a feelgood film per se – if anything, Ricki’s career as a feelgood covers guitarist is somewhat bleak – but that it is still invested in the rapturous, breathless communion with faces, bodies and cinematic moments that made feelgood viable in the first place. Precisely because it is so minor, then, it has been dismissed as one of Streep’s misfires, but in reality it is one of her very best late performances, suffused with an oddball, roaming, periptatetic body language that only Robert Altman really managed to draw out again in this way after it reached its high point in Death Becomes Her. Over the years, death has become her more and more, as it does older actors, but few films have celebrated that with such picaresque fortitude as Ricki and the Flash. When an actor is as overexposed and overdetermined as Streep, the greatest gift they can receive is a minor role, and that's what she's offered here, in a more than worthy successor to Rachel Getting Married, and a high point for both Demme and Cody, which is perhaps the best way to describe this unusual, dissonant, resilient film.