There’s a special feeling when you watch a movie, suspended in disbelief and overwhelmed by a single thought: How on Earth did this get made? That’s not an insult, mind you—I’m speaking of the kind of movie that’s so incredibly out there, so bold and outrageous, that you can’t imagine someone actually getting the money to make it. The newest member of that distinctive club is A24’s first foray into musicals, appropriately titled Dicks: The Musical. Based on the play Fucking Identical Twins by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp (who co-star), A24’s latest is poised to be one of the funniest, silliest, most inappropriate, and most ridiculous movies of 2023.
The film follows Trevor (Jackson) and Craig (Sharp), identical twins separated at birth, who each has no idea the other exists. Trevor and Craig wind up working at the same job, and it’s there that they make the miraculous discovery that they are related. They want to know everything about each other, especially who their parents are; they each live with one parent, and have never met the other. This gives them the perfect opportunity to riff on The Parent Trap, swapping identities to try convincing their divorced parents to get back together.
The film boasts a great cast alongside Jackson and Sharp, including Bowen Yang as God, Nathan Lane as Harris, the boys’ father, and even Megan Thee Stallion in her film debut, delivering one of the year’s greatest bops. Everyone is memorable in Dicks, but nobody comes close to the gonzo, out-there brilliance of the one and only Megan Mullally.
In Dicks: The Musical, Mullally plays Evelyn, the boys’ mother, who they try to convince to re-enter a relationship with their father, Harris. It’s a role that merges everything we’ve come to love about her and takes it to new heights—and, especially, extremes. In a film every bit as outrageous and absurd as this one needs, Mullally’s performance is so deliciously committed that she may, in fact, get committed because of it.
Mullally has often played characters who seem a little… unbalanced, but as Evelyn, she doesn’t seem that way—by any litmus test, she is undoubtedly, certifiably off her rocker (or in this case, wheelchair). Her apartment is every bit as kitschy as she is, with surfaces drowning in tchotchkes and knick-knacks that sit somewhere between gaudy and iconic. Her cornucopia of stuff has a purpose—she watches movies with her dear friend Patricia (a flowerpot), and regularly has intercourse with a small blue ceramic boot—so even though she lives alone and never leaves her house, she’s not lonely.
It also helps that her fashion sense is lively enough for multiple human beings. Every outfit Evelyn wears in Dicks belongs in an exhibit—get on it, FIT! She dresses like a grandmother who wants to do nothing except play Euchre all day, but also like she could kick your ass if it came down to a brawl. Nothing makes sense about the textures, the fabrics, or the bold pattern combinations, and yet, it all perfectly matches this larger-than-life, extremely confounding, and utterly delightful character. That’s to say nothing of Evelyn’s various headpieces—an outstanding butterfly headpiece is the highlight of her unpredictable fashion.
The real gift Mullally bestows upon Evelyn is her voice. It’s difficult to describe just how off-putting it sounds at first, but after a brief moment, it’s hard to imagine what life was like before you’d heard it. The best way to describe Mullally’s Evelyn voice is as if Donald Duck has become fully committed to camp and developed a helium addiction. It gets under your skin, but I learned to love the way my hair stood up at the back of my neck as Mullally’s vocal concoction made my blood curdle. Her vocal patterns never once relent, creating the best kind of fever dream.
Best is that Mullally’s voice for Evelyn never obscures the joke. Every new detail she reveals is increasingly preposterous—she’s apparently 94 years old, despite no real aging makeup and clearly being decades younger. She uses a wheelchair, though she gives every indication that her legs are fully functioning. She tells her son Craig that she couldn’t have possibly had more than one child—he was “the only boy rocketing out of my vagina,” as she gently explains. After all, she had a vasectomy exactly one second after his birth, so that he would have a twin is simply impossible. And at the end of one of her show-stopping musical numbers, Evelyn sings with incredible gusto (and Donald Duck voice fully intact) the line, “My pussy fell off.”
Yes, Evelyn’s vagina literally fell off and walked away. But she still has it—she keeps it in her purse.
As spectacular as it is, that Mullally goes there shouldn’t be surprising: If there’s one thing we know about the actress, it’s that she is willing to do absolutely anything to make her characters memorable. Parks and Recreation boasted a magnificent, large ensemble, but Mullally’s character, Tammy II, proved especially impossible to forget. Mullally relished every hyper-sexual line delivery and was more often than not fully nude—performing as someone without a hangup in the world, she was able to create one of television's most memorable characters. And there’s a reason everyone’s favorite Will & Grace character is neither Will nor Grace, but Karen Walker, Mullally’s comedic tour de force role. And in Bob’s Burgers, she stretches her voice to a nasally extreme as Gayle, who has become a fan-favorite character for her wild and unpredictable antics—a trademark of Mullally’s best characters.
With Mullally, every line reading is a gift, and absolutely nothing is said—or performed—the way you’d expect it to. There is always a surprise when Mullally is on screen, and Dicks: The Musical provides even more overwhelming evidence that she’s one of the funniest people in show business. As always, her character here is the kind that's so quirky, you’ll want to base your entire personality off her—but if you do, expect to wind up behind bars.
