Daniel Radcliffe stars as parody singee „Weird Al“ Yankovic in a movie that started life as a Funny or Die sketch, a trailer for a fake Behind the Music-style biopic. With Evan Rachel Wood as Yankovic’s girlfriend Madonna and Rainn Wilson as Dr. Demento. Streaming free on the Roku Channel Nov. 4.
Polygon has a team on the ground at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, reporting on the horror, comedy, drama, and action movies meant to dominate the cinematic conversation as we head into awards season. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s TIFF premiere.
For nearly five decades now, one man has defined what parody music looks like at its best. His subjects have ranged from pop icons like Madonna and Michael Jackson to rock and hip-hop creators like Joan Jett and Coolio. He isn’t known by his name so much as by his chosen title: “Weird Al” Yankovic.
Some of the first words uttered in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story are meant as satire: “Life is like a parody of your favorite songs,” a nod to Forrest Gump’s iconic “box of chocolates” line. This is what every single beat of Eric Appel’s feature film expansion of his Funny or Die short of the same name aims for. Why wouldn’t a biopic of a parody artist’s life be a parody itself? Accordingly, Weird is relentless about poking fun at practically every damn subject it touches. Co-written by Appel and Yankovic himself, the film both embraces and skewers most of the musical biopics that came before it, along with the history of music itself. It’s something of an onslaught of humor, using every scene as an excuse to deliver one or more jokes — usually a lot more. Much like Appel’s original faux-trailer short, the feature rewrites Yankovic’s life by creating a strange amalgamation of reality and fiction.
Weird starts at the faux end of Yankovic’s life, in a hospital death scene quickly revealed as a fake-out and setup for a long history. Appel and Yankovic (played in the film by Harry Potter series star Daniel Radcliffe) take their sweet time moving through the kind of moments that music biopics are well known for doing to death: childhood trauma and fractured parental relationships, meteoric rises to fame and casually shocking collaborations, a tender mentorship and a heartbreaking descent into the world of drugs, sex, and alcohol. One of the film’s greatest strengths is the way it expertly links these false scenarios in with Weird Al’s real history, consistently forcing the audience to question what reality really means within fiction.
Accuracy has become the definitive measure of how contemporary biopics are judged, but Appel and Yankovic question that concept. Some filmmakers choose to sacrifice history in favor of a sanitized, accessible product, typically at the request of the artists being documented, or those who manage their image. (Bohemian Rhapsody is a prime example.) Other filmmakers aim for something closer to an honest version of reality, like Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent, as opposed to Jalil Lespert’s “approved” Yves Saint Laurent. Or they embrace fantasy and metaphor to paint a greater portrait of an artist, like Todd Haynes’ brilliant I’m Not There.
