Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Most ultimately grow out of them.
But not Dean, Wes and JT. Their own imaginary friend has proven far too useful to outgrow.
Back when the friends were kids, Ricky Stanicky was a remarkably wily scapegoat. Did someone urinate in the front yard? Ricky Stanicky did it. Does a bedroom smell like weed? Blame Ricky Stanicky.
But as Dean, Wes and JT (ahem) matured, so did Ricky. He weaned himself off drugs. Started volunteering around the world. He suffered and recovered from cancer. And through it all, Ricky Stanicky always wanted his pals right there with him—through every hard season, through every celebration.
Isn’t it interesting how Ricky’s emergency calls and celebrations always conflicted with an impending dinner with the in-laws? Or a boring weekend at home? Or struggles with a significant other?
Ricky’s most recent call was among his most serious: The cancer had come back, he “told” Dean over the phone. He was all alone in a hospital in a nearby (but not too nearby) city.
Dean wished him the best: He and TJ obviously couldn’t miss TJ’s wife’s baby shower … could they?
Of course they could! Erin, Dean’s significant other, practically forced him out the door—telling him to support his friend in this hour of need. TJ’s wife, too, was all too willing to give TJ the green light.
And just like that, Dean and TJ were free—thanks to Ricky Stanicky. They quickly met Wes and flew to Atlantic City for a night of music, gambling and fun.
Too bad TJ’s wife gave birth while they were gone.
Another thing to blame on Ricky Stanicky, right?
But here’s the thing: TJ’s mother-in-law is getting suspicious. She would love to see this Ricky Stanicky. And wouldn’t you know it? They’ll be holding a briss for TJ’s new baby in a matter of days. What a great opportunity for Ricky to meet everyone.
That won’t do at all. It seems as though the jig is up. This multi-decade lie will finally come to an end, and the three friends will have some serious explaining—and apologizing—to do.
Or … they could hire someone to play Mr. Stanicky. Just for the afternoon, mind you.
Yes, the crazy career of Ricky Stanicky might be coming to an end.
But he might have one last curtain call in him yet.
Dean, JT and Wes meet the guy who’s destined to play Ricky Stanicky in Atlantic City: His real name is Rod, and he’s a third-class impersonator with a third-class, near-pornographic show. They soon hire the hard-drinking, washed-up never-was to play their imaginary friend.
But Rod takes method acting to a new level. Knowing that Ricky was once a hard-partying lagabout who quit booze and drugs and turned his life around, Rod gives up drinking, too. He plays the role of a do-gooding activist so convincingly that, in a way, he becomes a do-gooding activist. Every hour Rod’s in Ricky’s shoes, he seems to become a better person. And Rod gets to a point where he doesn’t want to give Ricky up.
That comes with some significant complications, obviously. TJ, Wes and Dean were hoping to say goodbye to their imaginary friend forever—not have him move in with them. Decades-worth of lies could come crashing down.
But from our point of view, that in itself might be a good thing, right? Lies are bad, and a little comeuppance might be a good, healthy thing. Wes, from the movie’s earliest stages, encouraged his friends to come clean—to confess, apologize, make restitutions and move on. Dean and TJ are incredibly resistant, naturally. But Wes—and the movie itself—knows that hard truths are ultimately better than easy lies.
[Spoiler warning] As the film goes on, Rod’s “Ricky” persona insinuates itself into the lives of Dean, TJ and Wes more than any of them could’ve ever imagined. Dean means to put a stop to it by any means necessary—other than telling the truth, of course. Wes calls him out on it. “Do you realize that Rod had a fake life, and he made it real?” he tells Dean. “You had a real life, and made it fake.”
A briss, the Jewish circumcision ritual, is central to Ricky Stanicky’s appearance. TJ and his wife bring a rabbi into their home to perform the ceremony. And as he begins the critical operation, he prays for God’s blessing on the boy and his family. The rabbi wears ceremonial robes and uses a ceremonial circumcision knife, and every guy at the ceremony wears a kippah.
The complicated story of Ricky Stanicky has been painstakingly written down by the three friends—in a hefty tome they all refer to as “the bible.” When someone asks about Ricky’s dramatic turn from drugs and a squandered life to his alleged do-good activities around the world, Dean says that he was “born again.”
Christmas is referenced—but how that reference manifests itself is perhaps a better fit in the section below.
Rod’s stage name references a state of erection, and his whole stage show is predicated on twisting popular songs to reference masturbation. (He dresses up as the song’s original singers and treats his audiences to suggestive, even pornographic, lyrics. His impersonations include Alice Cooper, Billy Idol and Britney Spears—wherein he dresses in a short skirt, a midriff-baring top and a suggestive brassiere.)
Before that act, Rod mentions he ran an animal act wherein the featured performers, a pair of dogs, would copulate on stage. (We later see this act performed.)
Wes is gay and lives with his partner. When he was just starting to date his current boyfriend, he lied and said he was also dating Ricky Stanicky—whom Wes described as bisexual. When Rod learns about this wrinkle in his backstory, he demands that Wes tell him exactly how intimate their supposed relationship was—using some humorously crude terms in pressing Wes for information. (Wes insists that his “relationship” with Ricky consisted of just a couple of dates, and their physical relationship didn’t go far.) Their past “relationship” forms the basis of several running jokes.
Wes mentions that when his lover told his parents that they were together, his parents stopped inviting him over.
Wes also confesses to Rod that he loves Christmas: “It’s the gayest holiday anyway,” he adds, saying that it involves bedazzling trees. He laments that Santa needs to be fat and longs for a holiday made for gay people. Much later, he fulfills a lifelong dream of writing a book about Christmas for gay people—featuring a shirtless, chiseled St. Nick on its cover.
When Dean and TJ’s boss speaks publicly, someone notes that his hand gestures suggest oral sex. (This running gag is repeated throughout the film.)
A lot of jokes are made about the central ceremony of the briss—along with plenty of comments on how well-endowed TJ’s infant son is. “Ricky” tells Erin, Dean’s live-in girlfriend, that he’s seen plenty of pictures of her. “Tasteful, of course,” he adds. “Even the nudes.” “Ricky” tells of how he one time walked in on Bono having sex with his wife, and how they invited him to watch. A shirtless man carries around his infant son as part of a bonding exercise. (The baby tries to suckle on the man’s nipple.) Someone strips down to his skivvies and dives into a crowd. Rod mentions that her mother was married six times.
We hear several jokes that involve sex, bodily fluids and/or various body parts.
Two men get into a violent confrontation and wind up wrestling on the floor. But it lasts for just several seconds and is played, mostly, for laughs.
A guy is hit in the face. Someone’s conked in the head with a couple of bowling balls.
Two tough-looking guys spend much of the movie on the lookout for Rod. He believes that the men are out to kill him. We hear that someone suffered a broken arm as a child. A duck does its best to drown a dog.
Nearly 50 f-words and about 35 s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “crap,” “d–n,” “h—” and several crude and obscene words that stand-in for either body parts or lewd acts. God’s name is misused more than 15 times (twice with “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused seven times.
Rod is an alcoholic. When working in Atlantic City, he spends much of his free time trying to bum drinks from tourists—so much so that a bartender does his best to shoo him away. As he’s leaving a casino, he grabs someone else’s unattended drink and slams it down. He drinks whiskey straight from a bottle. But when he’s forced to make a quick getaway, the bottle breaks—and he licks as much liquor off the concrete pavement as he can.
But when he’s hired to play Ricky Stanicky, whom the “bible” says has been clean and sober for seven years, he immediately goes stone-cold sober himself. When Dean, Wes and TJ pick him up at the airport, he looks terrible, suffering symptoms of withdrawal. He’s sweating and pale; he suffers some minor seizures. He tells his employers that he’s been “cold turkeying the booze for three days, smashing my old record by three days.”
Rod’s alcoholism and withdrawal are played for laughs, naturally—but the film doesn’t make light of the problem itself. (We hear about other folks who had drinking problems, and those problems came with some damaging consequences.) He admits his alcohol addiction. And as Rod stays sober, we can see what a difference that sobriety makes in his life (a far more responsible message than we see in one of John Cena’s other notable R-rated comedies, Vacation Friends).
Someone asks Rod how, given his alcohol issues, he’s managed to stay so ripped. “’Roids,” he says, admitting he’s addicted to them, too.
Ricky’s fabricated backstory is filled with substance abuse. When someone asks why “Ricky” looks so much older than Dean and his other friends (given that they all went to school together), Dean says it was all the drugs Ricky took. “Huffing glue, the works,” he adds. In an animated flashback sequence, we see the three friends smoke marijuana in someone’s bedroom—then blame the smoke on “Ricky.”
At the briss, Rod and his employers worry that one of the guests might know who Rod really is. Wes suggests drugging the guest with ketamine. (He has a bottle of the pills, which he says used to belong to his now-dead grandmother.) They plan to wait for the drug to take effect, then pack the sleeping man in a taxi and send him home. After some debate, the friends decide it’s a good idea—but their scheme fails, and they accidentally drug the rabbi instead.
Wes uses marijuana. We see him with a joint, and he tenderly trims a marijuana bud at his apartment. He, Dean and TJ also drink quite a bit on their secret outings: They quaff beer, whiskey, shots of liquor and, occasionally, wine. Dean and TJ’s boss smokes cigars (though we see only his cigar holder, not him actually smoke a cigar itself). A pregnant woman argues with her husband about whether she could have a glass of wine or not. (She says that her doctor said one glass would be just fine.) Someone asks a bartender for “organic vodka.” There’s some discussion about cannabis-infused milk.
When Rod is going through his alcohol withdrawal, he vomits in a trashcan and wets his pants. When Dean, TJ and Wes notice, Rod tells them not to worry: “It’s just p-ss.”
Ricky Stanicky was “born” during a Halloween prank gone awry: Dean, TJ and Wes leave dog feces on a neighbor’s front porch and light it on fire. But the fire gets out of control and, as the boys try to put out the blaze, the dog poo explodes and splashes all over the three kids. They run away as the fire spreads to the porch as a whole—but not before Dean leaves behind a jacket with the name “Ricky Stanicky” in it.
It was the first lie in what would become a web of similar deception. Faced with the threat of exposure, TJ says it’d be unfair if they got caught. “All we did was tell one lie,” he whines.
“Hundreds and hundreds of times over many years,” Dean reminds him.
Two characters were raised in abusive homes.
Someone describes the story of “Ricky Stanicky” as a “tale of redemption, rebirth and love.” And we could stay that about the Ricky Stanicky movie, too.
The movie—setting aside, just for a moment, its legion of problems—comes with some upbeat messages. Ricky’s fabricated story feels like one we might hear from a church pulpit: A heinously wayward youth who was (in Dean’s own words) “born again.” He moved past his addictions to become a far, far better person.
That story, set down in a “bible,” becomes a real-world inspiration for the person hired to play him. He, too, shakes his addictions and becomes a better person. Even the three guys who hired Rod learn from Ricky: They embrace the beautiful gifts they’ve been given and reject the shallower pleasures that Ricky afforded them.
But now we come back to the film’s problems. It’s many, many, many problems.
Yeah, the film has a heart. Maybe even a point. It also has an incredibly high ratio of scatological and sex jokes per minute of screen time. It’s lewd and profane and incredibly vile. It pairs sweet messages with inexcusable bilious content—so much so that it feels like the movie is asking you to wade through a mile-long open sewer to get to a pretty little beach. And then you notice that there’s a nice little sewage-free pathway that would’ve gotten you there just as easily.
Ricky Stanicky tells us that lying is bad—then spends two hours gleefully embracing lies. And that makes this imaginary friend not one to invite over.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
