The moment Mamie Gummer first appears on screen in Ricki and the Flash, she is pure rage. Her hair is a tangled tumbleweed of knots, her face is blotchy, her eyes red. All that's missing from the picture is the steam pouring out of her ears.

"I just launched from a cannon," Gummer, 32, says of the moment. "Honestly, the tumbling down the stairs and building up speed that way kind of felt like a launch pad, you know, and once I had the velocity I just ran with it. There was no pulling back. It was like a fire engine blowing."

Of course, it's not Gummer letting off steam on screen. It's her character, Julie, a young woman whose marriage, and life, is falling apart.

The anger is all directed at one person: her mother. What makes the scene so notable is that the woman playing her mother is Meryl Streep. Who just happens to be the woman who gave birth to Mamie Gummer in real life.

Ricki and the Flash is the third time mother and daughter have appeared in the same film, but the first time they can really be said to have worked together.

In 1986, an infant Gummer (credited as "Natalie Stern") appeared in Heartburn, the Mike Nichols-directed film of Nora Ephron's memoir about her failed marriage to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein (the couple were played by Streep and Jack Nicholson, and Gummer was their child). "I was a wee thing. I don't have any memory of it." But it must have happened, she adds, because "there's photographic evidence of it".

In 2007, Gummer played the best friend of Claire Danes' Ann, a 1950s cabaret singer, while Streep played the same character 50 years later. For obvious reasons, they were never on screen at the same time.

Jonathan Demme's new film is different, a comedy with live music (which is to say the music is actually recorded live, with no overdubs, by a kick-arse band that includes Rick Springfield on guitar, Bernie Worrell on keys and Streep on lead vocals).

It's about a fractured mother-daughter relationship, with Streep's Ricky Rendazzo a struggling musician whose brief flirtation with fame – a single album released in the 1980s – has given way to the just-this-side-of-grim reality of a day job in a grocery store and nights playing in a bar band before heading home to a tiny rented apartment in LA.

Julie has been brought up by her father (Kevin Kline) and stepmother Maureen (Audra McDonald) in a household as orderly and affluent as Ricki's is chaotic. She barely knows her real mother, but is furious at her all the same.

It's hard to imagine there's much in that relationship that echoes real life for this pair. Talking of that opening confrontation on the Today show in the US recently, Gummer observed: "It was a little bit troubling to look at the person that you love most in the world and just … [go crazy]. It was a little bit alarming how quickly that all was accessed, and I was worried that I would be wounding to her in some way."

Gummer admits the idea of working with her mother was appealing, but insists it was first and foremost the character that drew her to the role. Specifically, the fact that Julie is so different to the work she has done recently on television – as the lead in Emily Owens MD, a comedy-drama about a slightly ditzy medico that appears to owe more than a little to Offspring, and as the faux-bumbling lawyer Nancy Crozier in The Good Wife.

"I've been playing characters that have that really lovely half-up/half-down hair-do and lip gloss and form-fitting scrubs that have been, like, tailored," she tells me. "Just to do away with all that and be strikingly honest and laid bare was fun. It felt vital and it felt exciting, the opportunity to play someone who's going through something and is a real mess."

As it happens, divorce is something Gummer has been through herself. She married actor Ben Walker in July 2011 (they'd been together since early 2008), but the couple split up two years later. Was that experience something she drew upon to tap into Julie's rage?

"I never felt quite like that," she says. "I've had heartbreak and loss and grieved … but in terms of my divorce, when I tried to actively say, 'I'm going to think about when this terrible thing happened to me now', it didn't aid the process. It actually kind of alienated me from her.

"I wish that it were that easy," she adds, "that it was just like a filing cabinet that you could go to."

In person, Gummer is elegant, likeable, but a little reserved. You get the impression she wouldn't be drawn into an open session of self-analysis on Oprah's couch as readily as some others in her line of work.

Occasionally, her voice drops to a whisper, then gives way to a throaty chuckle. It's that and the gentle reserve – as much as the blonde hair, high cheekbones and long Nordic nose – that marks her as her mother's daughter.

Mamie and her 29-year-old sister Grace (she played reporter Hallie Shea on The Newsroom and one of the "mad" women in Tommy Lee Jones's recent western The Homesman, in which La Streep also appeared) have both come relatively recently to the acting game; brother Henry Wolfe Gummer, 35, has done some acting but is mainly focused on music. The youngest of Streep's four children with sculptor Don Gummer, her husband of 37 years, is Louisa, 24, who has modelled but so far resisted the lure of the stage and screen.

"She's working in marketing and is incredibly well-adjusted. Good for her," Mamie says. "She has seen enough of [the acting profession] now to weigh what she wants and she recognises that she needs structure. You've got to be able to just roll with the punches a bit, and if you're self-aware enough to recognise that's not going to make you happy…"

Mother Meryl told an Italian reporter in 2009 that she had worried about precisely that when her daughters first expressed interest in acting. "I'm proud of my daughters and … I am happy," she said. "At first I was worried about them, but now I want them to do what they love."

Still, following in the footsteps of the world's most famous and acclaimed actress, a woman who has been nominated for 19 Academy Awards and won three of them, must be daunting.

"That's the thing that's going to precede me no matter where I go," Gummer recently said. "Getting on top of the elephant and riding it around the room sort of felt like a better way to deal with it."

Even so, she didn't actively set out to pursue a role where she could clamber on board that elephant. "No, it's odd, we hadn't really discussed the idea of working together previously, and we hadn't really discussed this film," she tells me. "It was just that there was a wordless kind of exchange and an implicit shared feeling that it was the time to do it, and this was the thing to do."

And in case anyone wants to suggest this is Hollywood nepotism at work rather than a case of smart casting, she has this to say: "You know, my mom really loves me but I don't think she would stake a $20 million movie on me if she didn't believe and trust that I could show up and do it well. So her belief in me, and her confidence in my ability, was great."

Now that this Rubicon has been crossed, is there are any chance the whole brood might one day perform together? "I'm trying to think of what we could do," she wryly muses. "Little Women?"

More seriously, she says she's thought "passingly" about doing a stage production of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, with her brother too. "That would just be if someone could give us a garage to do it in," she says. You'd figure it would have to be a very big garage indeed to accommodate everyone who'd want to see that.

Gummer has ambitions to write and direct and produce. Her first foray will be with a short film she's making for Planned Parenthood. She says she's excited by the current "feminist moment" in Hollywood, in which the industry has begun to take notice of the fact that there is a massive female audience – and a sizeable male one, too – that wants to see stories made by, for and about women.

"I hope it goes beyond the chatter, the hype that it's hip now to care about these issues, and that change is actually effected," she says. "I don't know anyone who would actually say, 'I just really want to play the big-titted arm candy. That's my dream'.

"Maybe they do," she adds wryly. "I don't know."

Maybe they do. But not in her family, we're pretty sure.

Ricki and the Flash is released in cinemas on August 27.

Mother-daughter acting combos

Blythe Danner, Gwyneth Paltrow
East Coast royalty, this pair appeared together as a mother and daughter in the Sylvia Plath biopic Sylvia in 2003. A young Gwyneth also had a small role in Cruel Doubt, a 1992 telemovie in which her mother starred.

Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha and Joely Richardson
Vanessa Redgrave has appeared with her daughters many times over the years, starting in 1968 when the young girls made brief appearances in The Charge of the Light Brigade, which starred Mum and was directed by Dad, Tony Richardson. Natasha, who died in 2009 after a skiing accident, also appeared with Vanessa (as mother-daughter pair) in Evening, the 2007 film that Meryl Streep and Mamie Gummer also appeared in. Joely and Vanessa also played mother and daughter in the TV series Nip/Tuck.

Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith
Melanie was just 18 when she first appeared with her mother, who had starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), in The Harrad Experiment (1973). That's where she met Don Johnson, who would become her husband (briefly) and the father of her daughter, Dakota. They reteamed on screen in 1981 in Roar, about a home invasion by a pride of lions; it was directed by Hedren's then-husband, Noel Marshall, and he, Hedren, Griffith and cinematographer Jan de Bont (who later made Speed) were all severely mauled by lions during production, and needed stitches and/or plastic surgery as a result. Hedren and Griffith last worked together in the 1990 thriller Pacific Heights.

Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher
The famously fraught relationship between mother (who starred in Singin' in the Rain at just 19) and daughter (who was 20 when she first played Princess Leia in Star Wars) is evident in the fact they've never quite appeared together on screen. They have come close, though. Both did voice work for the same episode of Family Guy; Fisher wrote an episode of Roseanne in Reynolds appeared; and, most notably, the 1990 comic-drama Postcards from the Edge was basically a fictionalised version of their lives, with Meryl Streep playing the Carrie Fisher character and Shirley MacLaine the mother.

Melanie Griffith, Dakota Johnson
She went from Dakota who? to a star almost overnight thanks to the dubious merits of Fifty Shades of Gray, but Dakota Johnson was pretty much born to acting. Her first and so far only role with mother Melanie was in Crazy in Alabama (1999), directed by her then-stepfather Antonio Banderas. She was 10 at the time.

And some other notables

Janet Leigh (Psycho) and Jamie Lee Curtis (A Fish Called Wanda). See them together in: The Fog (1980).

Goldie Hawn (Private Benjamin) and Kate Hudson (Almost Famous). See them together in: family photos only, so far.

Catherine Deneuve (Belle de Jour) and Chiara Mostroianni (Bastards). See them together in: Beloved (2011).

Jayne Mansfield (The Girl Can't Help It) and Mariska Hargitay (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit). See them together in: your dreams

Jane Birkin (Death on the Nile) and Charlotte Gainsbourg (Jane Eyre). See them together in: Kung-Fu Master! (aka Le Petit Amour) (1988)

Peggy Lipton (TV's Mod Squad) and Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation): See them together in: Angie Tribeca (forthcoming comedy series directed by Steve Carell).