Diablo Cody’s new movie stars Meryl Streep and Streep’s own daughter, Mamie Gummer, as mother and daughter. It marks the reunion of Streep and Kevin Kline for only the second time since Sophie’s Choice (after A Prairie Home Companion). But all Cody wants to talk about is Rick Springfield, who plays Streep’s on-again-off-again boyfriend, the strummer in her character’s bar band.
“I’m just obsessed with Rick Springfield! I think everybody was by the time we wrapped. There’s just something about rock stars, they’re way cooler than movie people to me. He just exudes the rock-star charisma and I want to be his friend so badly. The guy can really shred!”
At 65, Springfield is annoyingly handsome even today, almost four decades after his original, simultaneous early-80s run of chart-topping hits, plus fondly remembered role on the daytime soap General Hospital. This is exactly the kind of person she wants in her movies. “I thought to myself, who am I not seeing represented? Being a writer who lives off her ideas, and whose ideas are always dwindling, I try to think what hasn’t been done lately. I thought I haven’t really seen a lot of romantic stuff with older performers, older people. So now, thanks to me, you can get to see Meryl Streep make out with Rick Springfield! That is my gift to the world!”
Ricki and the Flash is almost a musical, featuring a dozen or so performances by the titular covers band, who, after the death of their rock’n’roll dreams, still toil nightly on stage before a drink-sodden crowd. Ricki abandoned her family back in Indiana years ago, works as a supermarket cashier and lives close to the financial brink, but is called back home to deal with her daughter’s recent mental collapse. Along the way, the tunes the band perform (Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, Dobie Gray’s Drift Away) act as a Greek chorus for the script, filling out plotlines and clarifying small resolutions that may otherwise only be suggested by a glance or a judicious edit.
As you might expect from a movie directed by Jonathan Demme, all the music is played live and in the moment, featuring, besides Springfield, late Neil Young touring bassist Rick Rosas (to whom the movie is dedicated), Parliament keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Joe Walsh’s drummer Joe Vitale. “There’s nothing in the movie that was pre-recorded,” says Cody. “Most music – live music – in movies is so fake; pre-recorded, and everything is sweetened and boosted and tricked-out. Here, the band had one chance to get it right and I think it put a lot of pressure on Meryl, for example. She’s an amazing singer, but she had never played guitar before so she had to learn for this movie.”
It’s a monsoonal evening in west Hollywood. In two days’ time the skies will drop thunder, lighting, flash-floods, apocalyptic weather, but for now everyone in this bar-restaurant just sits around dazed and lightly glazed with sweat, waiting for the summer rain, as Angelenos will do. I’m having a hard enough time with it, but I wonder how it feels for Cody, who shows up with bright red-dyed hair, a long black dress, and seven months pregnant. “My kids are crazy – in a good way – all boys, five and three and this guy coming, so some days it’s like I’m living in my own fraternity.”
She looks enviously at my scotch and soda. “I just don’t know what to do with myself when I can’t have alcohol …” Actually, she doesn’t need it – her wit, acuity and sharp tongue are dependably in evidence without any booze, and her chat is barbed and funny throughout.
Cody is living the quiet life these days, eight years after her fabled rise from – to give the official publicist version – “feminist stripper to Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Juno”. She’s married with kids, has a house in the San Fernando Valley, and is glad that the spotlight no longer shines as harshly on her as it did back in 2007. I ask her if she’d recommend that experience to anybody.
“No, I absolutely would not,” she says with a degree of vehemence. “And every time I say this I feel like such an asshole, because I do have a tremendous amount of gratitude for the experience. But it was very traumatic. It’s completely strange to go from being a totally anonymous person who couldn’t so much as get a short story published, to suddenly having this Academy Award-nominated movie, to getting lots of press and people wanting to take my picture. It didn’t suit me. It didn’t suit my personality at all. I’m really not the outgoing person that people seem to think I am. I’m much more chilled and laid-back, and I think there would have been many, many people who would have enjoyed riding that rocket a lot more than I did, I’ll put it that way.”
That whole stripper thing really did seem too much like a publicist’s dream.
“I was only a stripper for a year of my life – a year which will haunt me in perpetuity! That was in 2003, and 2007 was when the movie came out, which is a pretty short span. It was strange. I know people who’ve handled it a lot more gracefully than I have. Like Lena Dunham, who I think is brilliant, does not seem remotely traumatised by her success, she seems to be managing it very well. Whereas I was really scared off. I do everything in my power now to – I don’t know what the opposite of courting attention is, but I won’t even go out to a premiere, I really am just a stay-at-home mom. I just don’t want to be scrutinised.”
Not to say she hasn’t been busy since Juno, it’s just that the hits have been more elusive. She made Jennifer’s Body, a modestly amusing high school vampire movie with Megan Fox, which went nowhere fast two years after Juno, and made her directorial debut with Paradise, a sweet comedy about a young woman raised in a religious community who takes off for Las Vegas, which also vanished quickly. Her masterpiece, though, was Young Adult, also directed by Juno’s Jason Reitman, in which Charlize Theron plays a young-adult author who returns to her hometown under the demented illusion that she can tempt her now-married, new-father high school boyfriend to abandon his wife and run away with her. It is a deliberately, brilliantly excruciating experience; truly exhilarating and hair-raising to watch.
“I was in a really dark place when I wrote that script, perhaps obviously,” she recalls. “I wanted to write an ugly character, and I think it was a response to what people seemed to be expecting of me at that point in my career, which was another winsome, bubbly Juno-type character. And I thought, that’s not really who I am. That happens to be the movie for which people know me, but who I really am is a cynical, hard-drinking, bitter person,” she chuckles a little madly, “so it was cathartic for me because I think of everything I’ve written, and that script reflects me much more closely than my other work. And Charlize is way scarier in it than she was in Monster, when she was a serial killer! I’ll say it straight out, I think she should have been nominated for an Oscar for THAT movie, and I’m still kinda pissed off it didn’t happen.”
The projects keep coming, though. She’s at work on a Barbie movie, about which all she can tell me is “Ken’s in the movie, Barbie’s boyfriend – that’s the only spoiler I can legally give you. They own me!” And her adaptation of the 1980s YA novels Sweet Valley High are in development hell for now, though the script is written and there are even songs written and recorded for it.
She’s philosophical about it, though she feels maybe her career trajectory happened in reverse.
“Maybe I’m just way more sensible than I thought I was. But I also I can’t imagine how deliciously rewarding it must be when you have a long steady career, like a ladder towards winning the highest accolade in your field. I can’t imagine how great that must feel. It’s very different to have that kind of success right out of the gate, when you know you didn’t really deserve it, you’re not quite sure how you arrived there and now that you have, you’re just scared.”
Well, I tell her, that’s how it happened for Orson Welles, and we still talk about him. Cody smiles, how happily I cannot tell.
Ricki and the Flash is released in the UK on 4 September
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion