Seriously Red

by Mike McGranaghan

I don't trust anyone who doesn't like Dolly Parton. This seems like a good rule to live by. Aside from being an extraordinary talent, both as a singer and a songwriter, she's a great humanitarian. She's got a charity that sends free books to children each month and used a portion of her royalties from Whitney Houston's rendition of “I Will Always Love You” to invest in Black-owned small businesses in Nashville. That's just the start of it. Yeah, if you don't like Dolly, there's something wrong with you.

Raylene “Red” Delaney, the main character in Seriously Red, loves Dolly Parton. As portrayed by Krew Boylan (who also wrote the script), she's a not-very-successful realtor and, frankly, kind of a doofus. Her boss astutely describes her as “the love child of Mick Hucknall and Ronald McDonald." Aside from being more dependent on her parents than any grown person should be, she's oblivious to the male best friend, Francis (Thomas Campbell), who's in love with her. Yep, that old cliché again. Red likes to dress up as Dolly Parton – or, more accurately, a really low-rent version of her – to sing karaoke. Pretending to be her idol helps her escape the reality of who she actually is.

A chance encounter lands Red with Wilson (Bobby Cannavale), a guy who runs a celebrity lookalike business. He helps her perfect the Dolly imitation for professional shows. This leads to a short-lived fling with his resident Elvis impersonator (Rose Byrne), and a more serious relationship with his Kenny Rogers (Daniel Webber). Because Kenny and Dolly were friends and recording partners, get it? The more she gets into Dolly, the more her confidence grows, but the more she loses sight of herself. If you guessed the movie's third act has a message about learning to love yourself instead of pretending to be somebody else, you are 100% correct.

There's a fun premise here. Seriously Red doesn't know what to do with it, though. Aside from the obvious, predictable point about being true to who you really are, the romance between Red and Kenny is too superficial to make us care. The central joke, i.e. that Wilson's impersonators look and sound nothing like the real people, isn't funny. Then there's the matter of Red, who is a very annoying character. She's so incessantly obnoxious that I stopped rooting for her early on. Some of that is the writing, some the performance. This film needs a funny leading actress. Krew Boylan is simply not funny as Red. The kicker is that Rose Byrne is right there. She could have made this character truly lift off.

Going back to the writing, the screenplay is so weirdly erratic that the movie feels like a demo reel designed to show Boylan in different lights. Moments of broad slapstick rub up against moments of heavy melodrama. Certain scenes are supposed to be sincere, others half winking at the audience. The actress also made the bizarre decision to write scenes that repeatedly require her to be nude on camera. It happens three times. One sequence is maybe artistically justified, as Red sees a plastic surgeon for breast implants and shows the doctor what she's got. The other two are totally gratuitous, adding nothing meaningful to the story. I always find nudity-for-nudity's sake (male or female) distracting. All of these factors create a “Look at me!” quality that undermines the story that's unfolding.

Seriously Red was directed by Gracie Otto, whose 2021 music documentary Under the Volcano is worth seeking out. She pumps as much energy into the proceedings as she can. A few small laughs can be found intermittently, and Byrne and Cannavale are typically good. Beyond that, this is a picture that's not as funny as it thinks it is, not as touching as it wants to be, and not much of a tribute to Dolly Parton, either.

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