Rickerl - Musik is höchstens a Hobby (2023)

Erich “Rickerl” Bohacek is an amateur musician who plays in pubs. In his early thirties, he lives in present-day Vienna on the edge of subsistence. He tries, with limited success, to work as a gravedigger, a sex-shop attendant, and a sausage-stand seller, primarily to avoid having his benefits from the Public Employment Service cut off. He has a six-year-old son, Dominik, with whom he spends time every other weekend, while Dominik’s mother, Viki, has built a new life with the wealthy “Piefke” Kurti in the upscale district of Hietzing. Rickerl is on bad terms with his own father, a compulsive gambler who spends his time at slot machines. He finds some support among his regulars at the local pub, who share his love of the Rapid Vienna football club. Viki still seems to like Erich, and feels at home among Rickerl’s pub regulars, but she is worn down by his unreliability. Rickerl hopes to find success with his personal, emotional songs, but repeatedly gets in his own way. He doesn’t even have a smartphone to record his compositions or communicate with his agent. His performances do nothing to advance his career: at a wedding in the Weinviertel, for example, he plays until a brawl in the audience abruptly brings the event to an end. When he is due to be featured on an ORF music programme, he turns around at the station’s door—apparently demotivated by a conversation with a seemingly more successful musician (played by Nino from Vienna)—and would rather spend the day wild camping with his son by Wienerberg Pond. When it occurs to him that he should actually be at his current job in the sex shop, he rushes off with his son, only to discover that he has left his guitar behind. He hurries back, but the guitar is gone. In the confusion, he has also lost his son, who is subsequently picked up by the police. Only then does he realise that he also has to take responsibility for his son. Later, he finds the guitar with a homeless man he knows and promptly gives it to him, taking only the song lyrics he had kept in the guitar case. Rickerl visits his father and tells him he is drawing a line under their relationship and wants to be a better father to Dominik than his own father was to him. Rickerl then records his songs in his council-flat apartment using a children’s guitar he had given Dominik and a cassette recorder; beforehand, he had typed up his handwritten lyrics. He plays the recordings for his manager, who is impressed. At the end, Dominik performs a song of praise he has composed himself for Rickerl. Rickerl and the people around him speak in a strong Viennese dialect. One version of the film has standard German subtitles. There is also an incredible amount of smoking in the film, not only in cafés and bars but even at the employment office. The end credits, however, point out that there was no sponsorship for the smoking and drinking scenes.