To follow her dream of becoming a rock star, Linda Brummel becomes Ricki Rendazzo, lead singer of Ricki and the Flash. A dream that pushes her to distance herself from her husband Ted and their three children to the point where she becomes a stranger to them. Now a cashier in a supermarket to support herself as she plays in a small bar in California, she gets a call from her ex-husband one day: their daughter Julie has fallen into a depression after being left by her own husband. Ricki decides to return to her family in hopes of assuaging her guilt, but finds a complicated family that has learned to survive without her…

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Ricki and the Flash is less a movie by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs , Rachel Getting Married) than by screenwriter Diablo Cody, who became a star by winning a Best Screenplay Oscar for the excellent Juno. She has since had successes (the excellent Young Adult with Charlize Theron, the amusing TV series The United States of Tara) as well as failures (the awful Jennifer’s Body and her first and probably last directing job Paradise) with the plot always surrounding a similar character: an iconoclastic heroine torn between her identity and her place in society. Thus the rock star mom who choses her career over her kids in Ricki and the Flash fits the rule. Except that the movie is so impersonal and safe that Diablo Cody’s mark seems to have been removed from what turns out to be a conventional family melodrama. Meryl Streep doesn’t get to do the work she is capable of – not even in the musical numbers, which are seemingly endless, boring and soporific. In the end it offers its target audience the basic package, hitting the usual emotional notes and an ending that is successful if not very exciting.