Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
In "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star," David Spade plays a beached sitcom star who valets at a chichi Hollywood restaurant. To the casual Spade fan, this might seem dangerously close to home. Every Spade outing fills you with worry that he's one knuckleheaded movie away from parking cars himself.
While annoying, "Dickie Roberts" is compelling enough to keep its star from having to take the keys to your Escalade. But it might bring him one step closer to Whoopi Goldberg's old gig as center square. Spade has co-written and stars in a film about celebrity demise. As it happens, "Dickie Roberts" is a comedy that's too close to pop-culture tragedy to be truly funny. A lot of it is painfully unfunny, but often for bizarre if not entertaining reasons. Take the closing-credits sequence, in which a gaggle of still-unemployable stars from shows such as "What's Happening?" and "The Brady Bunch" gather for a cheeky-angry "We Are the World" jam session.
Before we arrive at that sad reunion, the film plays as a couch trip that offers up Dickie -- and, by extension, Spade -- for a life adjustment. This comedy is a drama of a comedian's travails -- like Richard Pryor's "JoJo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling" without the second-degree burns, alcoholism, and self-doubting pathos.
Dickie was on a '70s sitcom, where his catch phrase ("This is nucking futs!") made him a national treasure. He floundered as a teenager, then as an adult, never letting go of his impossible dream of world-conquering stardom. He also realizes he's a freak -- he wears gloves to sooth his compulsion about touching -- but is helpless to stop himself.
He gets an incentive to overcome that and other neuroses when Brendan Fraser -- the Brendan Fraser, and not Dickie's agent (Jon Lovitz) -- gets him an audition for Rob Reiner's new movie. In an appalling preview of what directing "Alex and Emma" may have done to his career, Reiner agrees to consider casting Dickie in the lead, but only if Dickie learns what it means to experience real adult normalcy.
Spade fails to break character to remind Reiner that he once made the execrable child odyssey "North." But the movie is too smallminded to see Reiner as anyone other than the most powerful man in LA -- which might be the most pathetically misdirected exhibit of celebrity worship in recent Hollywood history.
Anyway, Dickie places an ad to live with a suburban family, moves in with the Tracys, and tries to start getting real. But since the movie knows only from bad television, Dickie grows only through a collection of diminished sitcom moments. There's the episode in which Dickie's waterbed floods the house, angering earnest Mrs. Tracy (Mary McCormack, who's actually quite good). There's the episode in which he learns to ride a bike, the episode in which he helps the Tracys' son Sam (Scott Terra) hit on the girl next door, and the episode in which he teaches Sam's sister Sally (Jenna Boyd) a routine set to Christopher Cross's "Ride Like the Wind" that wins her a spot on the pep squad. (In that same episode, Sally's prissy 10-year-old classmate does a hilariously inappropriate audition to "I Wanna Be Bad.")
"Dickie Roberts," which also has appearances by C-list TV legends Edie McClurg, Alyssa Milano, and Emmanuel Lewis, hints at a dark sitcom satire but remains hopelessly devoted to getting Dickie to the top. In this sense, the movie is a stage mother too stupid to realize her child has no talent.
Still, the movie, directed by Sam Weisman, manages to fascinate more than it entertains. All its favorable qualities lie in surreal ironies and meta-moments that are tough to ignore. For instance, that is former child star Leif Garrett, as himself, playing poker with Spade and other former teen and child stars Dustin Diamond, Corey Feldman, Barry Williams, and Danny Bonaduce. It's certainly surreal watching them all sit in somebody's shabby apartment, discussing how they "don't get the Brad Pitt thing at all."
"Dickie Roberts" doesn't strain for comedy in those scenes. They're heartfelt snapshots of what human kitsch does in its downtime.
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