PG, 101 minutes, opens Thursday, August 27

Director Jonathan Demme​

Stars Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Mamie Gummer, Rick Springfield, Audra McDonald

★★★★

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Meryl Streep​ is not only a chameleon, she's a time-traveller. Four years ago, she was tottering towards the grave with dementia as Margaret Thatcher. In Ricki and the Flash, she's wearing studs, leather and a hairdo involving a complicated construction of tiny plaits, and leaping around the stage in a rock band.

It's been said that she'll take any role that allows her to sing. But Jonathan Demme has gone one better. As Ricki, she's had to learn to play electric and acoustic guitars as well as singing. Ten production numbers animate the film's narrative, all of them filmed live, and Streep does pretty well. She's also been supplied with some formidable support. Ricki's band, the Flash, has Rick Springfield, plus three musicians whose combined resumes comprise an index to a selection of the best of 1960s and '70s rock.

Ricki is the creation of Diablo Cody (Juno, The United States of Tara), whose characters have never been known for holding back and Ricki is typical – a force who needs an audience to feel fully alive. These days, it's not a large audience. Her steady gig is a small club where her fans are dedicated but ageing fast. Nonetheless, their ability to boogie looks as if it'll be the last faculty to go.

Ricki has so much fun with them that her day job at a supermarket checkout is almost endurable. She lives alone, having failed to face her feelings for Greg (Springfield), who's clearly in love with her.

Then comes a summons from the past. Her ex-husband, Pete (Kevin Kline​), asks her to come to Indianapolis to help him with their distraught daughter, Julie, whose husband has just left her for someone else. Packing her guitar and quaking with apprehension, she sets out to try to reconnect with the family she walked out on years ago.

What happens next is all in the detail as old scores are settled en route to a tenuous reconciliation and its aftermath. In essence, it's high-class soap elevated by some finely calibrated performances and Cody's artfulness in enlivening the platitudinous with timely changes in tone. An unusually self-effacing Kline makes delicate work of his part as tentative peace-maker while Streep and Mamie Gummer, her daughter in real life, fight their way towards a rapprochement.

Gummer really goes for it. With tangled hair, no make-up and an impressive disdain for vanity, she looks at first as if she's going to be ferocious as the inconsolable Julie. But the script permits her some sardonic touches to leaven the effect and Audra McDonald is also assigned some subtleties as her stepmother, who seems initially as if she's going to be all too perfect to bear.

But Demme, who's made a few music documentaries in recent years, is at his best during the production numbers. It's their ebullience – and Streep's – which account for the fact that the film sends you out on such a high.