The new movie Dicks: The Musical opens with a disclaimer of sorts. “The following film was bravely written by two homosexuals, the first time gay men have ever written anything.” It continues: “These same two LGBTQ+ gay guys are also starring in the film, bravely playing heterosexual men. Which is again, brave.”
These title-card jokes provide some context for what follows. As soon as they disappear from the screen, we see the orgasm faces of the aforementioned guys—Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp—in extremely silly sex scenes with women. Then they start singing about how big their cocks are.
Dicks, which premiered in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco over the weekend and opens in wide release on October 20, is already an indie hit. It’s also, you can tell, is hard to describe without sounding absolutely insane. It’s a musical about two dudes—Craig Tiddle (Sharp) and Trevor Brock (Jackson)—who discover that they’re long-lost identical twins and then try to Parent Trap their family back together. Their parents, played by Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally, are, respectively, a gay man who keeps creatures called “sewer boys” as pets and a woman in her 90s whose vagina has detached from her body. Also, Megan Thee Stallion shows up as Craig and Trevor’s boss at the “Vroomba” parts company where they compete to be top salesman. And—oh, yeah—Saturday Night Live‘s Bowen Yang plays God. He’s the narrator.
To assert that Dicks: The Musical is a film with a message might be overstating things, despite the fact that its closing number features the lyrics “All love is love.” (Trust us, it’s not wholesome in context.) But if Dicks did have a message, it might be about how ridiculous and performative male heterosexuality is.
Before it goes off on all of its wild tangents, the initial gag of the movie—directed by Larry Charles of Borat and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame—is the absurdity of Trevor and Craig’s straight male confidence. “Our story begins, like all great stories, with two straight men,” Yang’s God explains. They are “oh, so very manly,” God continues—which apparently means they talk about “slay[ing] pussy everywhere,” steal cabs from pregnant ladies, throw their coffee mugs on the ground, and read a magazine that is apparently titled Absurd Titties.
Jackson and Sharp play this all with a gigantic hypothetical stage wink to their audience. It’s over-the-top, but that’s the gag. We’re both supposed to buy—or at least pretend to buy—that these guys are both straight and that they apparently look exactly alike. It’s not actually believable, but it is very funny.
We soon learn that Trevor and Craig both carry around deep-seated sadness due to their single-parent upbringings, and that they’re also each carrying around one half of a heart-shaped necklace, which leads them to the revelation that they are actually long lost siblings. As they begin trying to reconnect their looney-tunes parents, they continue to say things like, “I want to be brothers—no homo.”
The pleasures of Dicks—and yes I realize how that reads—are legion. (You can’t actually sing most of these tunes in public lest you offend someone.) Lane and Mullally are national treasures who’ll go to any length for a laugh, and Megan Thee Stallion’s willingness to get involved with this whole thing just makes me love her even more. The “sewer boys” are some of the weirdest things you will ever see onscreen. And the songs are genuinely catchy, almost to a fault—chances are you’ll skip out of the theater with “All Love Is Love” in your head, but good luck singing it in public without offending someone.