Boy Movies #47
On Donnie Darko and Dicks: The Musical
You’re reading Boy Movies. This is a rare evening issue, which I find to be fun and cozy on these increasingly chilly days, but also recognize that my gorgeous audience is likely uninterested in reading yet another email after a day of reading emails. Regardless, enjoy!
Oh, please, tell me, Elizabeth, how exactly does one suck a fuck?
Tis the season to rewatch Donnie Darko, and so I recently decided to rewatch Donnie Darko for the first time since high school. Longtime readers of Boy Movies may remember that I have been in an ongoing “brave era” since last Halloween, when I resolved to become less of a weenie and watch the scary movies I’d missed throughout my life due to, of course, being a huge weenie. (I watched Drag Me to Hell over the weekend, thank you very much, which left me 1. gooped, and 2. gagged.) Donnie Darko is the rare “scary” movie I was familiar with before this massive shift in my way of life, ever since friend of the newsletter Cassidy showed it to me in her parents’ living room approximately a century ago. I remembered virtually nothing about the plot, but I did see Frank’s fuckass rabbit costume in the Academy Museum a few months ago and a stranger laughed at me when I enthusiastically took a photo of it. You just don’t forget Frank’s fuckass rabbit costume.
Now, Donnie Darko isn’t “horror” in the traditional sense, though I should once again remind you that I am a major weenie and a lot of creepy things happen that left me unsettled, like every time Jake Gyllenhaal lowered his chin and aimed that sinister, half-lidded stare directly into the camera. It is one of the purest 21st century examples of a boy movie, following a mentally ill teen, the titular Donnie (Gyllenhaal), as he begins experiencing visions of a man dressed as a demonic rabbit (that’s Frank, mentioned above) who tells him the world will soon end. A jet engine crashes into Donnie’s room, and then he starts committing crimes around town at Frank’s behest. Insanely, this film came out in 20011, and as hack as it might sound today, it relies a lot on the question of whether Donnie is actually receiving real information about the end of the world or if he’s just living in some sort of SSRI-induced haze.
It’s been a big year for me in terms of revisiting old feelings and uncovering artifacts from my teens; I reread my favorite book from middle school over the summer, and last month when my mom moved out of the apartment she’s spent the last several years in, I unearthed a bunch of garbage that I had, at some point, stashed away in drawers and completely forgotten about. There’s something unknowable about those teen years that Donnie Darko captures so well; Donnie knows very little about the world, and assigns so much meaning to things and people that don’t matter, and allows small inconveniences to shatter and consume him. The adults around him don’t know anything either, though. It’s not going to get any better. The villains aren’t really the adults, most of whom are certifiably dumb and have no interest in connecting with young people, but rather the absurdity of peddling chastity and politeness as values. Donnie Darko verges into edgelord territory, but it’s so earnest in its intentions, made before online discourse started poisoning people’s minds and bleeding defensively into entertainment. You can see a version of this story where Donnie ends up a school shooter, but Donnie Darko neither shames nor infantilizes him. Rather, it presents him simply as he is, treating adolescence exactly as it should be treated.
Boy Movies endorses Dicks: The Musical
I regret to inform you that a bunch of ugly nerds on Letterboxd are disrespecting Dicks: The Musical. “Worst movie of the year,” these ugly nerds are saying, which wouldn’t be true even if Beau Is Afraid wasn’t the actual worst movie of the year. It’s not just the fools that write long, rambling entries On There and call it film criticism, but middling reviews from critics, too. A cursory Google search informed me that even the ugly nerds2 getting paid to write about Dicks were disrespecting it, with “tiring” appearing at least once in nearly every review I read. Okay, sure, I guess I can see that… if you suck ass?
Maybe I’m not the most objective party here, as I’m a big fan of Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson, the writers and stars of Dicks who I recently sat next to at a showing of Passages. Dicks, directed by Larry Charles (this man, an icon of boy cinema, gave us Borat), is an adaptation of Fucking Identical Twins, the stage show Sharp and Jackson used to do in New York — not Off-Broadway, but in the basement under a Gristedes, as they were quick to point out on a recent episode of Las Culturistas. Sharp and Jackson, gay comedians, bravely play two straight businessmen named Craig and Trevor, who are great at their jobs but feel a general sense of emptiness in their lives. They discover that they’re actually identical twins who were separated at birth and decide to do a gay version of The Parent Trap on their parents, played by Nathan Lane (dare I say never better) and Megan Mullally (out of control/amazing). Megan Thee Stallion is also there, and lest we forget the Sewer Boys. It’s raucous and debauched and depraved. For my money, it has the kind of gonzo, divorced-from-reality spirit that turned movies like Wet Hot American Summer and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping into cult classics, which makes me believe that time will be kind to Dicks.
Like what you like, obviously, I guess, whatever, don’t make me be diplomatic about taste, but as a wise dead woman once said, no one’s fun anymore! The best parts of Bottoms, 2023’s other alt-comic-to-gay-comedy-star showcase, were when it loosened up and got super weird: Ayo Edebiri monologuing about her future son Hezekiah, Marshawn Lynch reading porn mags at school, a rendering of the Last Supper hanging behind the football team in the cafeteria. At a Q&A after my screening of Dicks, Sharp remarked, “This movie really shouldn’t exist,” and that incredulous, gleeful energy permeates the film, as if Sharp and Jackson were always operating under the belief that A24 could rescind the check at any moment. That energy creates a flowy weirdness that I loved but is clearly rubbing others the wrong way; many have pointed out that the film’s sets, bad and fake on purpose, are poorly constructed, as if it’s a flimsy detail Charles, Sharp, and Jackson just hoped no one would notice. If you missed how that is obviously the point, helping to establish the film’s heightened reality, clearly Dicks was never going to hit.
I became familiar with Sharp and Jackson’s comedy style — which is gross, off-puttingly sexual, ludicrously strange, boisterous, and so very loud — because of their appearances on Las Culturistas (these episodes, to me, are sacred texts), drawn as I was to the shrieking and bullshitting they engaged in with hosts Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers. Reliably, Yang and Rogers come alive while sitting across from these two, their years of friendship creating a pleasingly stupid rhythm on mic that makes you feel like you’re sitting in a room with your best friends. Lusi and I always send each other breathlessly delighted texts every time a new “Josh and Aaron episode,” as they’re known to us, drops. Sharp and Jackson clearly have severe brain damage (affectionate), but it’s the kind that meshes well with my own brain damage. At the risk of exalting them, and Dicks, too much, I’ll just say that I will always be on the side of the weird movies. I will always be on the side of the movies that shouldn’t exist, but do anyway.
An earlier version of this newsletter erroneously claimed Donnie Darko came out in 2002. Please excuse me and then give me some money so I can hire an editor.
As a critic, I’m allowed to say this.
I've also vowed to re-watch Donnie Darko this season! hoping it's sinister angst holds up..
This came at the perfect time on my subway home!