Although Meryl Streep’s new film Ricki and the Flash looks like one of the least interesting movies ever made, it’s worth commending that the production team behind the movie did put a strong effort in to create, however misguided, a real sense of those all-too-familiarly-depressing dive bars where aging ex-hippies lives out their rock fantasies by playing souped-up karaoke versions of 70’s radio single-core tunes.
It seems as though Meryl did focus on trying to actually play the songs in the film (unlike the cringe-worthy miming in recent overhyped disasters like Whiplash), and part of that effort came from a brief guitar lesson with Neil Young, which she talked about on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon a few weeks back:
Now, Neil Young isn’t exactly someone I think you could practically learn all that much from, given so much of his playing comes from his spirit and his inherent musicality, rather than from formal training (or the ability to pass that training on). But it’s still pretty cool that these two met up and basically had Your Dad’s Beginner Guitar Lesson, at one of the great arthouse theaters and revival houses on the East Coast, the Jacob Burns Film Center.
There’s video of the lesson below, which is a pretty cool watch. Check it out:
