Ricki and the Flash (2015)

Jonathan Demme's Ricki and the Flash arrives with the quiet desperation of a bar band playing to a half-empty room. Meryl Streep is Ricki Rendazzo, a guitarist who walked out on her children to chase stardom and now works a cashier's register between gigs. Diablo Cody wrote the part with Streep in mind, and the result is a study in maternal guilt that never quite decides whether it wants to forgive its heroine or convict her. The film circles the double standard applied to a mother who leaves, a subject it handles with a raised eyebrow instead of a verdict.

The supporting cast supplies a mild current of contemporary sensibility. Audra McDonald's Maureen, the second wife who stayed, gets the film's sharpest confrontation and delivers it without flinching. One of Ricki's sons is gay, a fact acknowledged and then gently shelved, and the estrangement at the center of the story touches on homophobia only in passing. Julie's suicide attempt is treated as heartbreak, not as a clinical condition. These threads exist, but they never organize the narrative. Cody is too fond of her characters to turn them into arguments.

The film believes in performance as absolution. Ricki's redemption arrives through a wedding dance and a borrowed guitar, and the movie is content to let the music do the talking. Demme, in his final narrative feature, keeps the camera loose and the sentiment earned. The result is warm, uneven, and largely uninterested in instruction. It wants us to hum along, not to take notes. The cultural markers here are present but dormant, the kind of details that give a family drama texture without ever demanding that we applaud them. A modest vintage, then. Drinkable, forgettable, and mercifully free of sermons.

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