By John Corrado

★★½ (out of 4)

The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.

Expanded from an underground musical comedy act that co-writers Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp used to perform together in New York, Dicks: The Musical finds Borat director Larry Charles delivering an absurd, proudly irreverent musical comedy extravaganza (backed by A24, no less).

Jackson and Sharp co-star in the film as Craig and Trevor, two dickish, womanizing salesmen competing against each other, who discover that they are not only brothers, but “fucking identical twins” who were separated at birth and raised apart. Yearning for the stable family life they never had, the brothers hatch a Parent Trap-style plot to get their parents back together.

The only problem is that their mom Evelyn (Megan Mullally) is a kooky old lady who likes living alone, and their dad Harris (Nathan Lane) is now gay, and preoccupied with his Sewer Boys; two grotesque little creatures he rescued from the sewers that he keeps as pets in a cage (the most WTF aspect of the movie, and that’s really saying something). The game cast is rounded out by Megan Thee Stallion as the proudly misandristic boss, and Bowen Yang playing a gay, Asian God (yes, you read that right).

The best way to describe Dicks: The Musical would be as a work of high camp that is designed to be seen with an appreciative audience (the Midnight Madness screening was a raucous experience that helped it come alive, complete with a choir embedded in the audience that joined in during the final number, and dick balloons being tossed down from the balcony). It’s hard to even really evaluate it as a movie – it was very obviously made on a (relative) shoestring budget that mostly went to the actors, with a purposefully cheap, DIY look to the whole production – because it works best as a bizarre, profane communal experience that throws a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

The goal of the movie is to be as outlandish and outrageous as possible, with every one of the actors fully committed to the bit. That said, I’m not sure it all works equally well (some of it arguably does go a bit too far as it fully embraces leaning into taboos in the last act), and the story itself is pretty thin, even at a brief 86 minutes. But I did laugh quite a bit, and the Broadway-style parody songs themselves are surprisingly catchy. It’s a campy, queer musical that feels designed to be a future cult classic.

Public Screenings: Thursday, September 7th, 11:59 PM at Royal Alexandra Theatre; Friday, September 8th, 8:00 PM at Scotiabank Theatre; Saturday, September 16th, 9:30 PM at Princess of Wales